Coercion can be a relative thing - anything from slavery to a gentleman’s agreement that if you help me build a house, I’ll help you build a house, because neither of us wants to lift rafters on our own.
The work required to e.g. build a (reasonably large) bridge is substantial; the work required to maintain that bridge in a safe condition is also substantial and it’s quite well known in free software circles that maintenance is a lot less sexy than building another shiny new bridge - government can struggle with this too, but that’s where rigid safety and oversight systems come into it. Start looking at dams and it gets way more scary.
Many many safety failures affect far more than the person who made the decision. That said, you often find the opposite - many people value others’ safety more than their own.
And there we have the difference between advocating and enforcing. Plenty of people now have the time to focus on safety issues; doesn’t mean they get any more effect than the people advocating for veganism or environmentalism.
In a functioning system (and bear in mind that sometimes the US doesn’t have that, and I’m certainly not taking the US situation as a goal), a regulator is often going to step in and make you stop.
People only caring once it affects them personally means that the people who haven’t been affected yet are going to keep vibe-coding dams and drag-racing on public roads.