The golf version of that is that bogeys and double bogeys rarely go viral [with the exception of Jean Van de Velde, but that was a triple on the 72nd hole of a major]. Birdies and eagles are all that I ever see on the highlight reels.
Golf started its demise when medal play became dominant.
This is an interesting suggestion in the context of basketball and the 3 pt shot.
Shooting a 3 is, on balance, better than shooting a 2 pt jumper outside about 5 feet. This is just statistically true, at least at the pro level, when compared apples to apples (a wide open 15 footer might be worth more expected points than a double-teamed 3, but all things being equal 3 is worth more than 2).
NBA upsets happen, but they're not all that common. It's a high-sample-size sport (teams score 120 points per game vs a low-sample-size sport like soccer, where teams score once or twice a game - so an incremental-by-possession statistical advantage becomes significant by the end of the game), and the highest stakes games are part of a 7 game series which further reduces volatility.
Of course, the NCAA tournament is famous for upsets. Slower paced, lower scoring games help mitigate the possession-by-possession statistical advantage of the best teams, and all it takes to knock out a better opponent is one great 40 minutes. It's inconceivable that the 64th best pro team on earth would beat the Clippers in a 7 game series, but every now and then a Florida Gulf Coast might just make a Sweet 16 run in the NCAA.
That "smaller sample size" nature of NCAA basketball also makes the 3 point shot less valuable in a way. Because an NBA team can survive an inevitable bad shooting night in the playoffs, but an NCAA team probably can't.
Golf tournaments are almost exclusively played with a huge sample size. When you contest an event over 4 rounds and ~270 strokes, you create a certain predictability in the outcome. If big hitters have an incremental advantage on damn near every shot, it compounds over a 4 round medal play tournament in a way that's more significant than what happens in an individual match.
The best players will always win more often than the worst players. And golf is a naturally volatile game anyways - even the greatest players still win well under 50% of the time. But the version of golf we're sold most frequently is less volatile in structure than it could be. If you like the Zack Johnson's of the world, you'd probably see them win a little more often if match play was more prevalent.