FEC does not perform miracles. It only trades off some throughput for a few orders of magnitude in BER. FEC can also be defeated by common types of distortions. If you get a spike of alien crosstalk then you aren’t going to just get one bit error, so you really do need that high fidelity connection if you don’t want your link to shit the bed in the real world.
That quoted number might be 'before non-forward error correction', ie. Before resending the data, which involves an extra roundtrip and degrades service.
Why would applications even care about the BER before FEC?.