I'm a private pilot (general aviation, single engine cessna's). For the most part, our discipline is orders of magnitude higher than all but the best drivers. Airline pilots are orders of magnitude better than us. You are absolutely correct.

Not to mention the myriad of safety and control mechanisms in place on the aircraft (redundant systems etc) and away from it (air traffic control, IVR etc)

Airline pilot discipline was also probably pretty good fifty years ago yet the accident rate has dropped as the tech has improved.

A good pilot can sometimes recover from being given a bad aircraft. If the aircraft get better of course the accident rate will improve.

airline pilot selection plays also a role.

That's why at current we have 1.3 million people dying on the road in the US alone. It might make the matter of transitioning to self-driving worse, but it also makes manual driving worse.

The WSJ article includes NHTSA data indicating 'only' 35,000 traffic fatalities per yeah. Where are you getting this 1.3 million number from? That would be equivalent to a full 1% of US population dying on the road every 2.5 years

you're right. I googled for "number of car deaths in US" (or so I thought) and that number came up. 1.3M seems to be the number for world wide fatalities.

That number sounds like the worldwide number, not US. Many places have much, much worse road fatalities per capita.