This is the problematic false dichotomy. If you give someone a choice between "this specific set of onerous, expensive, competition-destroying regulations" or "you will be killed", they make the obvious choice.

But those aren't the only options. Existing regulations are poorly optimized. It would be possible to save the same number of lives -- more lives -- by doing more work to improve the benefit:burden ratio of regulations.

The problem is that people aren't interested in this. It's detail-oriented work that doesn't make for good sound bites, so the beneficiaries (the general public) aren't organized enough to know how to ask for it, and the organized incumbents don't want it because it would result in a larger number of viable competitors.

And it's too easy for incumbents to make the sound bites go the other way, by pretending that not spending a billion dollars to save one life is irresponsible, even though the same billion dollars could save more than a thousand lives if saved here and used beneficially somewhere else.