I am always getting anxious that I get electrocuted when I disconnect US plug. I wish the whole world adopted UK plugs and sockets for safety.
Like, it is possible, if one finger in a hand is touching the live prong, and another finger on the other hand is touching the neutral/ground prong, you'd pass current across your chest.
Or if you are touching something that is grounded, like a pipe/sink...
But actually dying this way is rather unlikely.
With respect to UK plugs, it's also common for them to have the live pins only half exposed, with the rest being insulator, to avoid the possibility of touching live pins while the plug is partially inserted.
On the mainland the sockets tend to be recessed to work around the risk, but the "europlugs" (which are not grounded) almost all have this property as they can't really be "sealed in".
Still harder to do than it looks, and to your point, very difficult to actually die from. Not impossible, but very unlikely.
The modern US one (NEC) is probably the best trade off of size and safety (see my parallel comment on its physical design). Though I do think there is still too much use of two-prong plugs, despite the near ubiquity of grounded sockets these days.
You can’t see this structure in the standard diagrams such as the ones in the article but you can tell it for yourself by inspection.
Although it is extremely solidly built, it's mostly built for a different context: the UK mostly uses ring circuits (similar to a ring network) rather than the radial topology used pretty much everywhere else. This means there can't really be "small" fuses at the fusebox, you can't put a 16A fuse for the entire ring because that'd be the load for all the devices in the house.
As a result you need smaller fuses at the plug level. An advantage of that is that your fuses can then be sized specifically for the appliance cable, and thus you can safely use much smaller cable e.g. let's say that you want to design a 2.5A extension cable, you can put a 2.5A fuse in it and be safe. In a radial context where plugs are unfused, somebody could plug a 10A appliance on the 2.5A cable and melt the cable, the fuse only protects the "wall" circuit and won't blow until >16A (generally).
In fact this has been an issue in the US in the last few years: because of the low voltage, 20A circuits have become more common, but extension cords are still usually 16A. If you plug a 16A cord to a 20A circuit and draw 20A from it, the fuse will be perfectly happy (everything's fine as far as it's concerned) but the cord can catch on fire.
Anyway since they needed larger plugs for the fuse, I expect the UK standards body reinforced the plug while at it.
Technology Connections recently made a video about this.
34 years in the US. I have never been electrocuted when plugging/unplugging anything. I dont know anyone that has been.
Wtf are you playing at? Everywhere across the planet has to adopt things that make you comfortable because you apparently dont know how to not touch the metal bits when unplugging something? Wait no, you're the one they write, "Dont eat package" for, aren't you?