Well-maintained planes don't do that.
Take-off asks a lot from the engines, and one nasty bit about manufacturing defects is that they can take a while to show up, but the bulk of them usually surfaces when the aircraft are relatively new.
But: this plane was delayed before the flight due to maintenance on engine #1, so that's the first place where I would start looking for issues without any kind of judgment beforehand on what you would expect to find. And that's the main issue with that comment, it assumes a conclusion, that's not how these investigations work because then you might miss the actual cause. And given how critical these machines are it doesn't take much. All it takes is a single, tiny mistake.
The really bad luck here is that it seems as though the failure of engine #1 took the center engine right along with it. That's one of the issues with that particular design, if you have debris from one of the forward engines it could easily get ingested by the rear mounted one.
Similarly, the MD-11 was a cost-restricted update of the airframe to avoid McD being frozen out of the 1990s widebody market by Airbus and Boeing.
McD management wouldn't fund the more ambitious four-engined MD-12, so the trijet's fuselage was stretched and aerodynamic tweaks applied.
The MD-11 never met its performance targets and heralded the end of the Douglas commercial line. It was fairly quickly relegated from pax to cargo service where it has a good payload but little else to commend it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
Once an engine breaks the question is whether or not it becomes unbalanced, that is one reason why they can become detached from the plane.
> In an effort to prevent similar accidents, officials captured and exterminated 1,235 Canada geese at 17 locations across New York City in mid-2009 and coated 1,739 goose eggs with oil to smother the developing goslings.[71] As of 2017, 70,000 birds had been intentionally killed in New York City through programs instituted after the ditching.[72]
The MD-11 was late to that party, and by the time they started flying they were already allowing twins to go farther. Now the limit is all the way up to 370 minutes from the nearest airport for some twins, and most are capable of flying transatlantic.
1. Boeing wants no more responsibility for these airframes. Good call by the Board.
2. MD-11 style engine arrangement is an entire design flaw in itself. You can only recover from an uncontained engine failure at V1 if two engines remain. Good luck with that since on the MD-11, engine #2's intake is in the debris field of the other two turbines.