You're not wrong, though it's worth noting there are two different things going on there. In terms of operations (flying aircraft) the honor system makes sense. You want everyone learning from each others mistakes so you need to encourage a culture of voluntary transparency. That means you are actively trading leniency in exchange for transparency to keep everyone talking. On the other side, engineering, there are very well defined frameworks for how you design, fabricate, test, and certify airframes. There's an argument to be made for working to minimize the pointless red tape (and oh boy is there a lot of pointless red tap) but self certification in the ream of purely capitalistic corporations isn't the right play. Individuals can be convinced to care about reputation but corporations are so profit driven and carefully structured to avoid liability that it's largely pointless to attempt to map individual morality onto them.