No, my bar for proselytizing about security practices is adequate, not perfect. The distinction is that adequate is an absolute bar, not a relative one, so "better" and "worse" are irrelevant until it is achieved since a "better" solution that is inadequate is not a solution that can be used (it is inadequate) and does not provide clear directions to an adequate solution. It is like climbing trees to reach the moon, no matter which is "better", you still aren't going to get there. The solution may be fundamentally different than what is expected.

That does not mean that a "better" inadequate solution is not a path to adequate, it could very well be if the "better-ness" can scale all the way, but that is hard to judge. One strategy for doing so is trying to estimate how far you are from good, that is the point of quantitative analysis. Using the tree to the moon example, if you could estimate the distance to moon, you would quickly realize that every tree you know of is pretty far from the moon, so maybe a different strategy is warranted. In this case, I want to estimate the "security" of an adequate solution. Is $1 enough, $1K, $1M, $1B? For what problem domain? How far are "best practices" from that goal? That is how I would decide if best security practices are worth listening to. The other point of quantification is to compare systems, you claim Google has better security practices, how much better? 10%, 50%, 100%, 1000%? That would change how compelling listening to their practices over others would be.

As you stated above, bug bounties are order of magnitude cost of discovery which, in my opinion, is a reasonably good quantitative security proxy. The Pixel 4 kernel code execution bounty is up to $250K. The iOS kernel code execution bounty is up to $1M. That appears to indicate that Google's offering is less secure by this metric. Even ignoring that, is $1M enough protection for a phone model line (since a bug in one is a bug in all, so a zero-click kernel code execution could potentially take over all phones, though in practice it will probably not even assuming such a vulnerability were used to achieve mass infection)? There were more than 200 million iPhones sold last year, so that is only a per-phone value of 0.5 cents, is that an adequate amount of security? Personally, I think no and I would bet the average iPhone buyer would be less than pleased if they were told that (still might not change their buying habit though). What do I think is adequate? Not sure. $50 is probably fine, $5 seems a little low, $500 is probably high since that is approaching the cost of the phone itself. If I use $50 as the metric of adequate, they are 10,000x off from the measure of adequate which seems pretty far to me. Think about the difference in practices between $100 and $1M and that needs to happen again, how do you even conceptualize that? Even at $0.50 they are still off by a factor of 100x, 1% of adequate from this perspective.

On the point of overestimating the "risk" for most software, I half agree. I believe the truth is that almost nobody cares about security, so the cost of problem for insecurity is almost nil. Companies get hacked and they just keep on going their merry way, sometimes even having their stock prices go up. However, I believe this is also an artifact of misrepresenting the security of their systems. If people were told that the per-unit security of an iPhone is 0.5 cents, they might think a little differently, but instead they are told that the new iPhones are super, duper secure and all those pesky vulnerabilities were fixed, so it is now totally secure again, this time we promise, just ignore the last 27 times it was not true.

On the other hand, large scale systemic risks are massively underestimated. Modern car models are internet connected with each model using a single software version maintained through OTA. This means that all cars in a single model run the same software meaning that bugs are shared on all the cars. If a major vulnerability were discovered, it could potentially allow take over of the steering, throttle, and brakes by taking over the lane-assist, cruise control, and ABS systems. If this is done to all cars of a given model at the same time, it is extremely likely that at least thousands would die. Even ignoring the moral implications of this, that would be a company-ending catastrophe which puts the direct economic cost of problem at value of the company which is a few billion to tens of billions for most car companies. Again, $1M is pretty far from this level, and there is no evidence that such techniques scale 1000x. Any solution that only reaches the $1M level, even if it is "best practices", is not only inadequate for this job, it is criminally negligent in my opinion and I believe most people would agree if it were properly explained to them.