Short pads on certain carts

[Vresiberba]

I'm trying to replicate the Blinking Light connector (for personal use) but ran into a snag with a certain cart having its PCB pads being too short for the connector I bought. This makes the connection between the connector and cart intermediate; sometimes it makes a connection, sometimes not. Top cart is Tiger Heli, with shorter pads, and the bottom cart is SMB.

How common is this?

[Fisher]

I remember to have read somewhere that this could probably be related to the PCBs being made at the edge of a big manufacturing PCB, but I simply can't find the place where I've read it!
I had one Return to the Earth, which I used to make a repro of Double Dragon II that has a similar "feature".
It has problems running on some NES clones.