I wouldn't characterize that as sloppy or buggy in any way (though certainly that is also true for some games). Exploiting hardware in new and novel ways was an essential part of developing for older consoles.

This is something someone only familiar with writing code for general purpose devices or higher level languages can't imagine. But when you're building for one very specific hardware platform you can tailor your code to that platform in ways that simply aren't possible when building for portability.