Ironically I think you got that almost exactly wrong.
Avoiding "cowboyism" has instead lead to the rise of heuristics for avoiding trouble that are more religion than science. The person who is most competent is also likely to be the person who has learned lessons the hard way the most times, not the person who has been very careful to avoid taking risks.
And let me just say that there are VERY few articles so poorly written that I literally can't get past the first paragraph, and an article that cherry-picks disasters to claim generalized incompetence scores my very top marks for statistically incompetent disingenuous bullshit. There will always be a long tail of "bad stuff that happens" and cherry-picking all the most sensational disasters is not a way of proving anything.
Avoiding "cowboyism" has instead lead to the rise of heuristics for avoiding trouble that are more religion than science. The person who is most competent is also likely to be the person who has learned lessons the hard way the most times, not the person who has been very careful to avoid taking risks.
And let me just say that there are VERY few articles so poorly written that I literally can't get past the first paragraph, and an article that cherry-picks disasters to claim generalized incompetence scores my very top marks for statistically incompetent disingenuous bullshit. There will always be a long tail of "bad stuff that happens" and cherry-picking all the most sensational disasters is not a way of proving anything.