>We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed,

Engineers tend to put care into building bridges that don't collapse, and have been doing so for millenia so collapses can happen, but are rare. "All the bridges that long ago collapsed" is in my opinion not all that many bridges, really [1], and lots of people remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. I still remember the bridge collapse from the Northridge quake too.

Bridges are a special case of civic architecture where long durability and long reliability are taken into account that are kind of a special class, so they're probably not a great thing to generalize from.

[1] You can judge for yourself from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures