I've seen the VE table being combined with the MAF on some cars. While it's not required to change or update it.. a difference can be noticed on some cars by VE tuning.

Also agree that some of the stuff in the notebooks can be outdated etc.

As far as expecting that a maf failure would result in the pcm defaulting to a rich condition, seems you have the O2 and MAF confused. Typically when an O2 fails, it fails low which tells the pcm it's lean and the pcm dumps a ton of fuel to compensate.