ET being the worst is mostly kind of a meme. It's a bad game, but its badness is far overstated. It's just a bandwagon that people jump on because it's funny or because the narrative is compelling. That it's the game that almost killed an entire industry, or the bit about all of the millions of carts dumped in a landfill (which is really more about bad forecasting by whoever chose how many to make) -- those are narratively satisfying, and it's fun to dunk on bad things, so the story spreads.
I'm pretty confident that there are worse Atari 2600 games, without even spreading the search farther. They just didn't meme as hard.
whenever there's a story like this, "one guy killed an industry", "one guy almost ended the world", "she was patient zero" etc the first thing I ever think is, well what kind of situation are you in where that is even possible to begin with. Clearly a billion things have gone wrong already. Tendency to always find one particular guy to pin it on is not good.
It's a very common perspective for bad game aficionados. Intentionally poor games are parodies and/or jokes.
Anyone can make a bad game.
Not many can make a truly excellent one.
So when ranking bad games, intentionally bad ones need something special to elevate them beyond parody status.
Unintentionally bad games are fascinating and often straight up funny. A lot of the fun is discussing all the ways it is bad and how on earth it could possibly have been released.
The same goes for bad film and/or music. You'll find it's the normal perspective.
But everyone has their own rules. You're entitled to your own set of rules.
I'm pretty confident that there are worse Atari 2600 games, without even spreading the search farther. They just didn't meme as hard.