I've always had French drains where I lived.
My parents' current house also has a dispersal drain for gray waters / toilets associated with a sort of septic tank (true septic tanks are now forbidden).
This drain disperses water under some sort of front yard (it's the countryside...) where the grass consequentially has a very high growth rate...
That depends on the principle, some are actually built to trickle and seep into the ground below.
Anyway I suppose that such concrete underground structures are often built on the cheap, and by the very nature of their content they're hard to inspect, so they're bound to develop a tendency to leak over the prospect of decades.
This drain disperses water under some sort of front yard (it's the countryside...) where the grass consequentially has a very high growth rate...