And this scenario seems to be happening a lot with Home Inspectors lately. I’ve been hearing this a lot lately because I have two friends who are realtors and they keep getting this from HIs hired by buyers. Now their colleagues are calling to ask me too. Someone I think offered HIs a class (maybe a Zoom class during COVID?) and spewed this as gospel.
Got one working on right now when HO called realizing he was over his head trying to change a light fixture and saw "a mess". The HO is now furious with that they paid for HI and several deficiencies were either missed or ignored.
Several just the use of a simple plug in tester should have picked up on. H/N reversal, grounded receptacles with no ground present, presence of ungrounded.2 prong receptacles to name a few. Also several glaring visual misses, NM wire run into heating duct, K&T present, old BX, old rag wire, rust and wet breakers (water in indicator window) in panel to name a few. None of which was mentioned on the inspection report.
And that doesn't include what was found once fixture boxes were opened to replace or repair. Open bared conductors (insulation brittle and falling off), burnt conductors, thhn used to jump from box to another box with no conduit and just punched through the 2 holes in the back of the metal box.
HO opened the ceiling in one room to allow for insulation to be installed and I found burnt wire, BX still live (probably because of the bad breaker condition in basement panel) and the wood rafters turned into charcoal.
Then there was structural issues, one was a whole beam section of the post and beams construction was completely rotted and the mortise tenon joint where the joist were falling, I found it when drilling a locater pilot hole to fish new wire for kitchen. (Only had one circuit and that was also the lighting circuit that included upstairs receptacles and light).
HI - buyer beware before using one. Most HI reports not worth the paper they are written on. My experience has been that they'll call out non issues and totally miss on real ones.