They are paid to be liable, and usually have the explicit authority to bind the company with their decisions (IE signing/etc authority). Part of the job is to be accountable for the decisions your organization makes, whether you made them personally or not. The buck stops here, so to speak.
This is intentional - in large companies actual responsibility for failure can be so diffuse that nobody would otherwise ever held accountable.
If you break down what happened here into pieces:
1. Root cause of problem
2. Responsibility for the problem
3. Accountability for the problem
4. What accountability looks like
This amounts to:
1 is "someone chose to use the wrong foam" for $reasons.
2 is whoever did that, probably not an exec. In large companies, or complex problems, responsibility can also be very spread out.
3 is what we are discussing - I would argue strongly that executives should be held civilly accountable for the decisions made by their organizations and criminally accountable for decisions made by their organization that they had direct knowledge of.
In general, execs usually are indemnified by the company for reasonable business decisions they make, so holding them civilly liable will not result in personal liabilty for them except to the degree they lied/hid/committed fraud, which is basically what you want.
4 i honestly have no idea what to do here.