The broad concept here certainly isn't new, we could cite everyone from Richelieu to Machiavelli. But I think you're right about the
systematic erasure of accountability being a more modern affliction, and I'm tempted to ascribe it to communication and data-handling technology. No matter how circuitous Henry II's "turbulent priest" comment was, he made an open-ended declaration to a specific audience, one loyal to him and full of military men. At best, people could say he ought to have known what would happen. At worst, he implied that inaction was treasonous and so his words had the force of an order. Which is not merely hypothetical; Henry was apparently condemned in his time by people who knew what he'd said.
These days, we've gotten much better at directionless provocations.
'Stochastic terrorism' was coined back in 2011 to describe mass media rhetoric which produces statistically-predictable violence from an unknown source. Where Henry spoke to his court and produced a murder by his knights, someone speaking online or on television can stir violence from someone they've never met, who will quite likely be the sort of person easily written off as "disturbed" or "not behaving rationally". The specific occurrence is accurately dismissed as unpredictable, without admitting that on average such actors will be exposed to the content.
Similarly, giving an employee a target creates an obvious expectation. If you direct someone to triple their sales in a month, they might tell you "I think that's impossible to do legally." If they then do it anyway, you lack plausible deniability even if you didn't instruct them to commit a crime. But today, you can punch a sales target into HR software and assign it, with no feedback channel, to 1,000 employees you'll never meet. Some will break the law, but when the whole thing goes Wells Fargo, you had no reason to know. If employees complain up the chain, the message can disappear or decay "between" layers, with no way to show that any one party knowingly concealed anything.
This seems to happen everywhere conspiracies and fraud used to operate. The "smoke-filled rooms" choosing political nominees get replaced with common-knowledge biases across donors and superdelegates. Price-matching means cartels get replaced with 'independent' but reciprocal high prices. Targeted bribery gets replaced with generalized expectations of favorable laws, post-retirement board seats, and so on. Honestly, the more surprising thing at this point is when people do make these things explicit and get caught.