I searched a bit but Google keeps pushing HARD to show more recent articles as exclusively as it can - even adding a number such as "2021" (with the quotation marks) does little to fight against that overwhelming trend. And DuckDuckGo somehow keeps showing content specifically for military rather than passenger aviation - maybe that search engine takes into account the location where the search originates?

In any case, articles about pilot shortages and concerns over aviation safety are ubiquitous and overwhelming in both number and severity of depressing content, so you will have no trouble learning about either matter, separately or conjoined. :-(

As for that specific event in the past though, it may have tied in particularly with the pandemic, so both acting as an extreme outlier and yet also somehow all the more representative of the industry as a whole, as it showcased the lengths that airlines were willing to go to in order to avoid spending money, at a time when they were under their highest stress.

Is that typical? For the front to fall off?

Some of them are built so the front doesn’t fall off!