When I play other peoples' games (i.e. when I GM games other people made), I find myself fudging rolls on occasion. It's really about finding a good balance of what's interesting, but that's something that goes into what system I'm playing. I think I generally agree with you that it's better to choose a game that is predisposed to the sort of narrative you want, rather than the one with the most popular ruleset. I'm not necessarily anti-fudge, but you only need something like 20% of what a novice wants to roll to be rolled ("Okay, you get past the door; why do I care how you do it if your characters have a half-dozen good ways to do so quickly and safely and it's irrelevant to the greater plot?").

I really don't like D&D. It doesn't build itself in such a way that you can really rely on random, but it also is very "flukey". Losing in D&D feels like getting pummeled over and over. It's like the scene in a superhero movie where the hero just keeps getting beaten, and you really want them to get back up and destroy the baddies.

In something like Symbaroum (which is fairly mechanically similar to D&D, but features much lower power levels and less character growth) or Degenesis, I don't find myself fudging at all because the whole idea is that life is short and dangerous.

Of course, in Symbaroum the GM rolls infrequently, and it's the same in Hammercalled, the game I've been working on. The only time I'd ever be tempted to fudge is in the initiative rolls and status effect resist rolls that NPCs get, and there's not even an opportunity to fudge anything else because it's all on the players to roll the rest (they roll defense, rather than NPCs rolling to attack them).