The core of your argument is that regulators are unelected (vs engineers ???) and incompetent, when in reality they either get counsel from people in the field, or are former or partially active members of the profession themselves.
Regulatory capture is a very common theme throughout every agency. Take Ajit Pai, who is and always was very obviously a Verizon stooge, as a textbook example. For that reason I don't blame anyone who would prefer a minimum of detailed, 'implementation-detail-level' government regulation on tech. Best case scenario they're poorly-written and arrest innovation, worst case they're also written to advantage the biggest or most politically-connected companies, who never deserve the help.
Also, looking from a step behing at our exchange, you are arguing that people need skin in the game to be fair and make weighted decisions, pointing at a writer who stopped having any skin in the game to write books and go on interviews and become an influencer.
The engineer, on the other hand, continues playing the iterated game of life, and so their reputation does matter (to themselves at least). Therefore, by making sure that any bridges that collapse has social stigma painted against those who designed and/or built it, it would encourage proper engineering even if there's no third party at the time to certify it.
> for the people who are still alive
The test subjects who are already dead don’t matter. GlaDOS, on the other hand, must continue to make choices in which experiments and test subjects will deliver the best bang for the buck.