It seems my mind fine-tuned the phrase without me noticing it, for years I’ve thought of it as:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity incompetence."

It hits a little harder, I think, because incompetence should be vincible, a condition that can be overcome, implying that it’s a choice, a lazy indifferent choice, a mediocrity.

I try to live by a similar “always try to interpret peoples actions in the most positive possible way”. This means that if someone says something hurtful, they probably didn’t mean it, either something came out wrong or you misinterpreted them. Spend a couple seconds thinking about what they could have meant, and suddenly you’re choosing to interpret them in a way that makes your day better instead of worse.

Same goes for actions. If someone does something you don’t like, you can very often choose to figure out what a good reason for their actions are. Trying my best to think like this has made me a lot happier and more easy-going.

When someone is road raging I like to pretend they have diarrhea

Aka Hanlon’s Razor