You might want to find out about your first assertion before making a statement like that without proof. Based on common comments I see here, without further evidence, I suspect your surmise about 'ability and the knowledge' is false, Occam's razor and all. Ticks and pops is a very common complaint! Phono sections that generate them are common too!
Let me see, now, you ARE aware I spent the first part of my EE career doing high dynamic range analog/hybrid hardware research at Bell Labs, right? Let's see, now, the ability to hook up the scope, look for instabilities, (including internal op amp instabilities) clipping, etc, that's handy, too. You are, of course aware that you have publicly accused me of being incompetent in my actual first field of research. So you might need to back down a bit. I've observed the performance of quite a few (non-crystal cartridge) devices, and while some of the low-end Shure cartridges had a pretty nuclear output level, I have very rarely seen that in any commercial device that's above the bottom grade of equipment. Even a PAT3 or PAT4 did just fine. I'm quite sure of that, and yeah, the "tone control" on both needed to be bypassed by a couple of decent resistors. That would be with any of a variety of MM cartridges.
I did see a few MC cartridges combined with external preamps that had a problem with high enough output to drive the phono stage then went into some issues, but that's easily fixed with a resistive divider, and the problem wasn't "pops and clicks", frank clipping is very, very obvious to anyone who's heard it twice.
Now, I don't have any equipment that runs on single-ended +5 volt, there's a reason for that.
If you're talking about phono sections in "modern" electronics (say after 2000) I haven't even seen one, because they don't appear to exist. But I do have both the understanding and equipment to properly evaluate anything I'm looking at, and you can be very, very sure I use it if I'm even slightly suspicious. Oh, and the kind of overload effects you're talking about aren't simply clipping, most often they are actual instability brought about by bad choice of gain element, and they are much less likely than you think, unless you're feeding a crystal cartridge into a single-ended 5V FET input op amp, in which case the designer crippled his/herself.
So slow down there, Gloria, slow down.
As far as surface noise of all kinds, my LP's are all over the map. Some of the older ones that were gotten via people giving them away in CD era have quite some noise, and most of those required some very serious cleaning. All of your LP's are clean? Really?