I have seen it in corporate environments where specific versions of things like bash (but more commonly, python, ruby, etc) are pushed to machines to places like /opt/ so that the deployed application could use them without fucking around with the package management of the underlying host. The deployed applications would then be kicked off in an environment with a modified PATH to reflect their dependencies being in those locations.

Those sort of deployments got a lot of milage out of /usr/bin/env