I am quite sure that until the early 2000's it was configured by default in many UNIX deployments, and I did use many flavours of it, starting with Xenix in 1992.
For sure; by the late 2000s I was still seeing it, but it was fairly uncommon by then. When I said "considered a bad practice since the mid 1980s" I was specifically meaning since Grampp & Morris 1984[1]. It definitely continued to be common for decades after that. I remember lots docs that told you to run "configure" where now they'd tell you to run "./configure", but the docs tended to lag behind the actual change to the default PATH.
