They're 1.5kg and the machine slides them, not lifts. Even if it did need to put exactly that much force to lift them, 15kg is really unlikely to kill you - toddlers keep jumping on parents without murdering them.
Everything shown in the industry backs up the claim of its dangerousness to the point where this entire article revolves around an industry changing in order to make up for that.
Why would you, somebody who is not in the industry and has absolutely no clue about this, have an opinion this strongly held?
I disagree with the response about the pin weight, because I've got enough clue about mechanics and safety to know it's very unlikely to be a full explanation. The lifting happens either on a conveyor or the lift/harness. We have existing systems that can ensure you don't crush people with the weight itself this way. The dangerousness may come from different parts like higher torque motors, or exposed parts, or programming issues, or ... So feel free to comment on that if you know the answer.
Basically, it's not just the force to move a single 1.5 kg pin. It's the force needed to move ten of those pins, plus the machinery for lifting and setting them into place, all of which needs to be overbuilt because it's being repeatedly hit by flying pins and possibly even the occasional ricocheting 7kg ball, and needs to stand up to that kind of treatment day in, day out for years or decades without completely falling apart. And then, because people like their games to keep moving, the drive mechanism for moving that whole huge assembly around needs to apply enough force to be able to raise and lower it quite quickly.
I'm no expert in any of this, but just taking one quick look at it I'm not at all surprised to find out that these machines are invariably hazardous. And probably most the ones in operation are even scarier than the one in that video I linked above, because it's a relatively recent model and, at least at the place I have been bowling, all the equipment looks like it could easily be older than I am.
If you want a system that only needs to be able to apply enough force to lift a single 1.5kg pin, well, it sounds like that's why the string setting machine was invented.
This happens absolutely constantly on cough various websites around the internet. People who are always the smartest people in the room in their industries commenting on topics like pinsetting machines. Pinch hazards are unbelievably dangerous and kill or maim lots of people every year. Operator fatigue, poor design, and thousands of other factors obviously contribute. But they wouldn't know because they've never worked in those spaces.