Yes. It happens. In a recent news clip a pilot was interviewed about the MAX and he raised the risk of bird strike and birthday balloons as something that “happens all the time”.
GP is (quite reasonably) using a deliberately slightly silly example as a rhetorical flourish. I would do the same. Think of it of a stand-in or totem for all of the possibilities (from silly to very real) that leap into horrifying life in an engineer's brain when they learn that a critical system has a single point of failure.
