There are so few lives lost thanks to the stringent requirements put in place, like the mandatory 90 second evacuation rule. Remove these requirements, and it's a guarantee that the numbers will go up, sooner rather than later.
Like most of those rules, the evacuation rules were established after a very thorough analysis of previous accidents, painstakingly determining who died where, and from which cause. It is not some number pulled out of thin air that is suddenly irrelevant thanks to "technology".
The MAX saga is a very good reminder of what happens when you start playing loose with those rules. People die. Quickly, and in mass.
And, as "luck" would have it, we are not even 3 months into 2024, and we have already been served the perfect, actual, counter example to this proposal: the JAL flight, where 379 lives where saved thanks to rapid evacuation.
I'll leave a nice little article link from January here. It just happens to have the perfect headline:
https://apnews.com/article/japan-plane-fire-safety-jal-tokyo...