I'd be wary of putting all of these examples into the same box, though.
If kids can't play outside anymore because of overprotective parents or an overprotective society, that feels to me like a net negative. If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off.
On the other hand, zero traffic death policies usually result in fairly cheap and only mildly inconvenient interventions (if inconvenient at all) to improve the legibility of key intersections and dangerous roads. Drives to reduce medical error usually rely on increased training or the introduction of fixed procedures or checklists, quick wins. Safety regulations in construction require proper dust extraction and safety at heights, and really the cost in better ladders, scaffolding, safety harnesses, vacuums and so on is completely negligible compared against the occupational hazards and chronic illnesses often suffered by older construction workers.
(And sometimes it's debatable. I feel like NASA could take a bigger risk on some manned missions if the astronauts agree, but on the other hand there's so much money and effort involved in these missions that it's not so strange that they want to get everything right, and that feels like the right culture and attitude. I feel like you should probably be allowed to swim anywhere you want even in still water or when there's algae, at your own peril, but really it's not that much of an inconvenience to go to a safer spot with a lifeguard.)
My impression is that what really ails Western societies is not necessarily risk averseness but rather gridlock, where a small amount of people can block a lot of progress for the rest of us. Gridlock has made governments averse to big infrastructure projects (e.g. high speed trains) and big changes in regulations that could move the needle (e.g. land value taxation) but they're not really averse to the risk, they're averse to getting swamped by interest groups and influential people with a vested interest in the status quo.