I don't think that's true. If you book a connection that involves multiple high speed trains across multiple country you can easily pay 1000s of $. Its actually more then many direct flights in Europe.

And for example if you take TGV from Paris to the German border, and you have to get on an ICE. If the TGV is late, you miss the connection to the ICE, and have to sleep in the border town, TGV doesn't have to pay.

And missing connection is quite common, specially because Germany is ... not very German.

In terms of safety, a train accident can kill 100s of people. They just don't happen very often.