I worked part time for a large police S&W distributor in the 70’s and 80’s as an armorer. My job was to inspect and ensure that outgoing department purchases of anywhere from a dozen to several thousand S&W revolvers were functional/complete and ready to go out in a cop’s holster.
Many departments wanted Pach’s on their issue weapons. SOP was to remove/replace the factory grips/stocks and discard the wooden ones and slap a set of rubber grips on the new outgoing revolver. Over the years I saw thousands of S&w factory grips get tossed and this was just one distributor in the S/W.