This is a management problem, because no-one wants to be accountable for a repeat incident even if it was rational to be working on something else more important.
I've heard this called "institutional scarring" in a blog post somewhere. The idea is a small wound can be replaced with tough inflexible tissue. The jist of the blog post was that just because something happened, doesn't mean you have to change things to ensure it never happens again because that can be an over-reaction that really burdens your future. Accept that loss and that it just might happen again, but that may be better than onerously preventing it with certainty.
Surprised you found it despite my butchery!
e.g., You were tasked with working on a ball of mud and it was miserable, so the next system you get the chance to build has to be the most scalable, modular, and cutting-edge thing ever, just to be safe.
1) We must do something.
2) This is something.
3) Therefore, we must do this.
Politicians, the media, corporations, and the public all have a part in this.
Sure, that's why the politicians want to be seen doing it. But the legislative focus is often on getting something passed now while it's a hot issue rather than on eventually getting a good bill passed (let alone deciding that we actually already have the correct amount of legislation on the topic).
Like many other problems in politics, the root of the problem is the other voters.
Waiting for something to actually happen before allocating resources to preventing it is (to some degree) a rational policy.
I spent a miserable year trying to convince people that they were over-reacting to an outage and there was a very simple solution to the exact problem that occurred. But when senior managers see their jobs at risk because of a repeat, they'll mandate that the entire department review their code for similar issues and remediate. They'll also listen to the loudest voices who somehow come up with massively over-engineered solutions.
Another example, we had a password expire which caused an outage on our trading stack. The amount of effort that went into stupidly convoluted hand-crafted solutions ensuring this "didn't happen again" was laughable. And in the end, after more than a year of work, the whole thing was abandoned in favour of a much simpler centralised solution that should have been done from the start.