Sure, there are other egresses available in principle. Hell, you can sledge-hammer your way through a wall in a pinch. But in any practical sense? Having two primary ingress/egress points is a horrible idea.
So I think maybe we've progressed beyond the bad old days of the early 20th century.
Yes, we have to some degree. That doesn't mean we should be complacent now.
And major fires that kill lots of people because bad decisions were made are not a phenomenon that stopped happening after Triangle Shirtwaist. Things got better, but we still have room to continue to improve.
I know that its hard to to believe that there has been progress in the last 100 years, as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc.
Of course I do, duh. The question is "how much has it progressed?" Note that the Hamlet fire I mention was in 1991, and the Station Nightclub fire was in 2003, so it's not like Triangle Shirtwaist is the most recent example of a mass fire tragedy. And there are other examples, those three just happened to be "top of mind" for me.
as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc
Sure, but most of those things are orthogonal to fire safety.
People keep talking about that handful of newsworthy events because we don't want there to be more of them. Or at least we want them to become less frequent, and less deadly when they do occur.