Your example of writing about the Kennedys would be focused on the social dynamics regardless.

Engineering is about the technicals, which includes safety codes, despite their contents having been created through the social processes of codification. It's an engineer's job to follow those codes, for better and for worse. On the whole I would say that is for the better, despite any corruption inherent to human processes.

I don't see how fire escapes were suspect in the context of buildings that were built around a single central open stairway. A second retrofitted external stairway is an obvious solution, using an exciting material of the time (steel).

I do suspect what we're missing from the article is a real sense of the time it took to make the transition away from this building design towards multiple distributed closed-door stairways with noncombustible finishes, including the elevators that make such designs palatable.

I could be wrong here, of course. But I'm not going to do a deep research dive to figure this out for myself, I'm content with the default answer of assuming the codes are mostly reasonable. Which is the same tack the author took. If you want to make a constructive point otherwise, you're going to have to do that work yourself.