I struggle to buy the "flat 4's all do it" argument, or the electrolysis. As Allen said above, Bruce noted, and Carey confirmed-- oil consumption is primarily an engineering and machining issue, and there's no good excuse for it.
I'm more tolerant of stuff like this with Type 1s-- because the design is almost 90 years old, and VW's Sainted German Engineers never designed them to make 180 hp with 94 mm cylinders. The makers of those cylinders just feed a tiny market with what amounts to small-batch runs of imperfectly designed and machined parts. It's up to individual builders to worry about piston clearance, whether or not the rings are gong to get gas-ported, etc. The Type 1 is typically hot-rodded on a tight budget, to within a mm of just flying apart... so there are bound to be issues. It's baked in the cake.
But this thing with the EJ motors (to say nothing of the Porsche M96/97 failures) coming from a mass manufacturer, shady enough to say that a qt/1200 mi is normal, or that there's nothing wrong with an IMS failure at <50k mi is just inexcusable. These are giant companies with huge R/D budgets, who apparently decided that these engine design and manufacturing flaws were good enough for who it's for.
I really can't imagine how this would all be going down if it were Ford or GM we were talking about. Detroit-bashing has reached a point where people don't even think about it, they just kiss the blarney-stone, and move on. It's taken as a matter of faith that German and Japanese cars are "better" by every metric, and that nobody is the world could ever hold a candle to their superior engineering.
There is no perfect platform.