You say that like all humans are alike: that they all care about getting fired, fined, or jailed; that they're even considering punishment when they're making their decisions; that risk factors into decision making.

What you are describing is a hypothetical "rational person". In real life, even the most rational people you know do completely irrational things routinely.

The Therac-25 engineers were accountable. The 737 MAX engineers were accountable. Accountability is doing much less work in the safety story than you seem to think.

The real work is done by process, redundancy, independent review, formal methods. None of these inherently require someone to be penalized for making mistakes, and penalizing people for making mistakes is a demonstrably, empirically unreliable mechanism for preventing mistakes.