Ironically, safety theater is a response to people unwittingly rejecting actual safety. People can't handle the grim idea of risk thresholds and someone else making those decisions for them. The more you explain how the sausage is made, the more disgust people feel. They go screeching to their politicians who make impossible rules banning numbers and demanding that everything be completely safe. So you put on a show and go back to doing the safety work in even more obscurity and difficulty than before. Some government agencies can weather these attacks on safety decently well when the work is mostly internal and private to themselves. But it really hurts product safety because the rules and numbers would have to be published, and companies can't legally analyze the risk and leave a paper trail.

The FAA almost certainly accepted this risk because it's just a mission hazard not a safety hazard and they probably didn't have the budget for it anymore. They'll never say more than "we handled it well", because that just invites the cycle of stupidity that makes people less safe.