This doesn't seem like a very sensible policy. There are a great many harms that once done, cannot be undone.
Since that harm is invisible, it is very hard to factor in, and is almost always ignored.
The permiting process for a normal residential block of flats in Prague takes several years, because every NIMBY can have their say repeatedly.
Everything can be overdone and we as a civilization might have overdone it with safetyism. On a similar note, look at the "free range kid" movement, which is fighting hard to give children at least some freedom which, 40 years ago, was considered absolutely natural.
I suspect that I would feel the same as you do about flats in Prague.
An argument against codes (and licensing) is they are one size fits all. Maybe someone with different preferences would trade off quality and price differently than you do. I think this especially shows up in licensing: a rich person wants their doctor to be extremely good, even if that greatly elevates the cost; a poor person would be better off at lesser quality medical care they could actually afford.
Most other developed nations do not mandate this, one staircase being considered enough. And they don't have an epidemics of fire deaths either. In general, frequency of fires in domestic settings is a fraction of those 100 years ago.
If Switzerland or Czechia can live with one staircase per building, so can the US. This alone would reduce costs of construction somewhat, and make some currently illegal construction projects legal.
Add up all the people who benefit from this. The regulatory bureaucracy, the engineering firms, every tradesman who holds a license protecting him from market competition, etc, etc. That's a hell of a lot of people. So the racket goes on.
This seems like the sensible course of action?
Also, any "value" from those things not being built is also invisible and very hard to factor in.
For example: statistical deaths can be compensated for by fines using the statistical value of a human life (about $12 M). Nuclear power regulation could be based on this principle.
[0] Except for reckless gamblers.
But more charitably: they did say "statistical death" so I presume the implication is "unintentional and non-targeted". Deliberately setting up deathtraps or ensuring a specific person will die but not others would probably be exempt. Of course that could be extremely difficult to prove if gross negligence became so easily affordable.
You "statistical death" is of course 100% correct. These kind of tradeoffs are done all the time when designing safety features, and using a monetary value per human life is the right way to do it.
Some people can't deal with that kind of rationality though.
Pay $12m in litigation to prove in litigation why your business thing is fine and legal
Pay $12m to off whoever's the driving force behind your harassment preventing them from doing it to the next guy who's pockets might not be deep enough to fend it off.
It's the pro-social thing to do really.
Because that would be completely impractical. It would cause the economy to cease functioning. Statistical deaths and individual murders are fundamentally different things.
There's a fuzzy boundary between the two (as effects are concentrated on smaller and smaller numbers of people) but that doesn't mean there's no difference.
Even with individual murders, there are gradations depending on intention and mental state. Manslaughter and first degree murder are different crimes, even if the number of dead bodies is the same.
There are just too many situations today where somebody is paying the fine with a smile on their face, if not settling for some trivial amount with no acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
Willful harms and even reckless harms by corporations need to be penalized aggressively and punitively. When a corporation worth $30 billion gains $1.3 billion in material benefit over 10 years by doing some activity that victimizes or risks people, it's fucking stupid to try and penalize them $10M with no jail time for anybody. "Cost of doing business" should never be a viable option, because the law needs a subjective bent, some small tyranny of justice, some adversarial person that corporations are structurally encouraged to be terrified of pissing off. If that means forcibly diluting their stock, or seizing the company, or terminating their charter, or throwing their executives down a hole for five years, that's evidently a necessary component of regulation. Deterrence is the name of the game, not just "seeking compliance".
We created corporations, and demand their executives, to behave in a psychopathic, amoral, "rational" profit-seeking manner by the legal fiduciary duty. Passively failing to significantly penalize predatory acts is actively encouraging their continuation. It's creating tools meant to do a thing (Hammers) and using them wrong (Juggling) and then acting stunned when they land on your foot, and spending the rest of the day glaring at and shaming the hammers, demanding verbal assurances that they'll never land on your foot again.
Occasionally, we hear about China rewarding corporate executives who commit malfeasance of a sufficiently malignant scale with capital punishment. The buck stops here. It sometimes makes the grass look greener on the other side, even with all the things I object to within that system.
To me, my own life is invaluable. I would assume most people feel similarly.