Jay,
I don’t want to discredit your experience, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. Airlines do care about non-part 121 xp. Just because you weren’t asked about your single checkride failure doesn’t mean that they don’t care.
Checkride standards may be objective, but an appropriate level of tolerances have been built into each maneuver to allow for minor deviations, because as you said, we are all human.
No busts should be everyone’s goal. One or two busts are not ideal, but aren’t deal breakers as long as you own up to and learn from them. Three or more shows a pattern of deficiency. Airlines will absolutely show more hesitation and concern for an applicant with 3 or more busts.
We would rather be realistic about expectations than shrug off checkride failures as minor hiccups and I believe that every mentor on this forum has enough experience to get that message across appropriately.
Again, your experience is your own, but I don’t think that your experience has the legs to stand on the over-generalizations that you are making.
Tory