Maybe it's because the names used in the '80s could be rather arcane (Rona Barrett leaps to mind)...

Since I'm in the middle of (re-)watching the series on Hulu: Rona Barrett was well-known enough to carry a clip-show episode of "Moonlighting" as herself (interviewing the characters).

Reviewed my copy from another affiliate. It was fine. 

And yes, stuff absolutely does get sent out wrong from time to time. The affiliate I'm at had to take a refeed a while back because they forgot captioning in the majority of the first feed of Entertainment Tonight. At least one station group with centralized master control accidentally ran one segment twice a while back on every affiliate at that hub. Countless examples of a station group getting confused and running "tomorrow's" episode a day in advance. I still recall the example from Drew's TPiR relatively recently that Steve mentioned.  And things get segmented wrong all the time, especially as station groups continue to reduce or eliminate staffing and the remaining employees (who are often doing other jobs alongside master control and ingest, themselves once separate jobs) are paid less and less so the positions attract less and less skilled employees.

tl;dr: Stuff happens.

Didn't Charlie O have a couple weeks of Wof after he passed? And don't forget Ritter as the center square on h2.

As for YBYL -- Leno did say he did not want to cross the picket line, but there was also some talk that he refused to take a pay cut to keep the show going.

Guess he didn't cozy up to that crew the same way he did when he took an allegedly sizable pay cut to avoid a mass layoff on The Tonight Show on his watch.

The last thing they would do is scrap a season, or even part of one.  That's just financial foolishness.  You dedicate the season to his memory, or some such, but you honor your commitment.