Arguably looking out the window and realizing they were in the Hudson River might have lead them to realize they weren't going to be swimming with their wheelie.

The U.S. is a very punitive society and I think if you were to find yourself in the tarmac after an evacuation holding onto your carry on, you’d at minimum be getting a large fine for disobeying a flight attendant and possibly more. Not being in the Hudson isn’t going to change the fact that you are ending up in the middle of nowhere once you are off the plane.

There have been many instances of people deplaning from an engine-on-fire plane in US, with luggage. Spirit, Southwest, and some Caribbean airlines in recent 2-3 years at the very least.

In such situations, people won’t think about that.

What I’ve read, the reason people taking their carry-on at least partly is because, when having to get out of a plane in a stressful situation, they won’t think “what shall I do now.”, but just activate their “deboard plane” program, and that involves getting their bags before getting out of the plane.

Then, the planes should be fitted with pilot-commanded overhead baggage locks.

The scenarios in which you want to lock the bins is precisely the scenarios where the locks are likely to fail - crashes.

It's already been reported JAL plane damage was bad enough that intercoms didn't work.

Can't lock them for the full flight, at most you can lock them during first/last 30min ascent/descent. But even there, many incidents begin in the air and precipitate an emergency landing. We will then add another item for the checklist (lock the bins) while they are supposed to be focussed on keeping the plane in the air and safely landing it?

So needless cost & complexity that will have maintenance costs, inconvenience costs.. and then have a high probability of failure in the one case it was designed for anyway.

Many problems are people problems and technology can't solve people.

With roughly half the number of passengers.

And twice as many working exits.