If there was no table, it would be the ground, and yes, it would. Not many things can stand in the way of a spindle hell-bent on chopping chips off a block of titanium.
It's a very fun thing to play with, though. Probably the most high-stakes programming most of us are ever going to get.
Much sadness will ensue.
But that still doesn't help in case of insufficient workholding or breaking tools.
Or go even more oldschool and have physical safeties on the machine that trip if your cutting tool attempts to exit the work area. I mean these aren't cheap machines, it seems like they could be engineered to be just a bit safer and error resistant.
There's a balance. Sometimes it really is up to the operator to maintain safety. Sometimes the machine can handle it. IMHO, other than reliably finding zero, everything else is up the the operator. The tool doesn't REALLY know how big it is or how fast it's going (just what it was told), and even if it did know, some operator would screw it up assuming that the tool was smart enough to adjust itself.
Do you manually monitor the entire job cycle?
The problem usually comes up by crashing into something that is inside its known workspace. e.g., cutting into a vise instead of the object that's held in the vise, or an incorrect offset causing a crash into the table. The machine may know that it can only travel up or down by 12.500 inches, but it has to hold cutting tools that may be of unknown length and that can cause it to hit things (like its own table).