Sorry, I'd blame the combination of harsh industrial environments and engineers at author's company who did not quite know how to manage those. Because there has been quite a number of very successful devices built from 7400 series TTL chips - for example famous Xerox Alto [0] is full of them.

(But yeah, 7400 are not a good chips by modern standards. Large static current consumption, and they will happily emit pulses on power bus while switching. But CD4001 is 60nS propagation, while 74S00 is 2nS propagation, so if you want high speed, you don't really have a choice. Just put lots of capacitors - for max robustness, you want one capacitor per each chip)

[0] https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/alto/schematic...