It's not uncommon, particularly for vehicles with composite body panels.
Smaller items like door trim, manufacturer logos, are primarily held on with adhesives.
Mid-size accessories like add-on spoilers on trunk lids, or other exterior styling pieces are frequently attached with adhesive.
A larger component commonly attached with adhesives are the rear fender flares on dually pickups. Very commonly these are built with a standard bed, and then the flares to cover the extra wheel width are applied with a 3M VHB-like adhesive strip.
But like anything, there is a way to do it properly, and a way to do it hacky.
Most plastic body panels are held on with conformal clips. But they couldn't do that with the metal panels of the cyber truck nor did they want visible fasteners so glue is the only option.
Glue isn't ideal because the part has to be clamped in place while the glue cures which is slow, and quality control is tough because you're doing a little chemistry experiment on your assembly line hundreds of times per day.
Normal cars have this problem with paint and quality control with paint is such a big deal that it has its own separate production line just for painting stuff pre or post assembly
Using composite panels is very uncommon in production vehicles and when they are used (for looks) traditional fasteners are used during assembly often with threaded inserts embedded in the composite panel during manufacture
Glue is uncommon in most cases, particularly for body-panel mounted things like the examples I gave. Adhesive-mounted components are common, to various degrees.
Glass-mounted items are commonly glued, the most prevalent one being the knob for the rear view mirror. And "prevalent" here means "99% of anything mounted to glass in a vehicle"
Tesla is using BETASEAL [0], which is designed for adhering to glass. I'm not sure what kind of weight rating BETASEAL is approved for, it is commonly used for other applications where a decent degree of strength is expected.
The lightbars mentioned in the article were an optional non-factory addon that were installed at the Tesla dealership. The steel body panels are not glued on.
Mid-size accessories like add-on spoilers on trunk lids, or other exterior styling pieces are frequently attached with adhesive.
A larger component commonly attached with adhesives are the rear fender flares on dually pickups. Very commonly these are built with a standard bed, and then the flares to cover the extra wheel width are applied with a 3M VHB-like adhesive strip.
But like anything, there is a way to do it properly, and a way to do it hacky.