I think that anecdote was more about a failing of an Engineer to bring safety concerns to management (the necessity of senior employees to keep design safe). If true, definitely the fault of the Engineer.

But there's no political pressure to do so.

There's no code that allows the engineer to say "no" and disable his management from going to the next engineer to say "yes" to that.

Building codes don't allow for that. If your building is prone to collapsing, then nobody is going to sign off on that, because they will be liable.

Which is probably what happened in this exact case. The senior engineers were being replaced with junior ones; exactly the kind of people who don't know to say "no".