Clearly there are serious scenarios outside M&A where we accept terrible failures due to regulations. Why not accept some in M&A as well?
I think one could argue that the business failure is likely to affect more people, therefore it’s a greater impact. Still, I ultimately agree with this stance (in the context of business survival, not personal); failure is an inherent risk of business.
The context in this discussion is comparing the hypothetical of a homeless person dying due to a systemic failure to the hypothetical of a business going bankrupt (without being acquired) due to a systemic failure.
This concept of presumed innocence ought to apply to this hypothetical homeless person: why not give them shelter (analogous to allowing M&A) by default, until someone decides it’s a problem? If a society is willing to accept this personal death, they should be willing to accept a business failure.