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Also, Chernobyl, due to cost, used channel reactors that the West was already avoiding due to safety issues inherent to their design. The most-famous nuclear disaster was entirely avoidable when it occurred. Though I suppose political and economic pressures and human error pose some level of risk anywhere.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I've also heard it suggested that the RBMK reactors were distinctly designed to be dual-use for plutonium (weapons) production. I'm not sure if that is somehow more difficult in a Western-style PWR, though. I know some of the (early) Western weapons projects (Oak Ridge, Windscale) used similar unpressureized reactors.
Being able to do partial replacement of fuel rods without shutting down a reactor is critical for bulk weapons-grade fuel enrichment, both to avoid the long cooldown processes from waiting for xenon poisoning to burn off, and because of increasingly bad plutonium isotope ratios caused by continued neutron flux exposure after a critical phase. RBMKs can do that, in ways that most other commonly-used reactor designs can't (while still having enough water pressure to generate industrially useful power, unlike the fully air-cooled Windscale and air-cooled-in-all-but-the-technical-sense X-10). See the Canadian CANDU reactor for a high-pressure variant of enrichment reactor.
While the RBMK wasn't finalized until after the USSR had started scaling back plutonium production, it's very plausible that the administration wanted to keep it as an option, especially as a 'deniable' option. That said, hot-fuel cycling does also have industrial and civil benefits, most directly in being able to provide slightly better uptime even with traditional fuel life cycles. And while some of the necessary compromises (most overtly the minimal secondary containment vessel aka building roof) probably made the disaster worse, most of them didn't make it happen to start with.
On the flip side, it was also much cheaper, and further corners were cut beyond the necessary minima for the design. Chernobyl's best known for the lackluster control rod design, but the extremely high void coefficient was entirely a cost-cutting measure and played a bigger role in the disaster starting. The physical containment being a simple generic building was unavoidable given the requirement for a big refueling crane, but it didn't need to be a glorified warehouse roof. The sketchy SCADA system was a matter of construction and development speed. So on.
If I had to bet, I'd say the costs (and speed of construction) were a bigger driver, but may not have been the only one.
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I am trusting Serhii Plokhy‘s book on Chernobyl regarding the USSR’s preference for cheaper reactors being the deciding factor. I’m not a nuclear engineer, either, so happy to consider additional aspects.
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