If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.
External fire escapes are merely the retrofit allowed to old single-stairway buildings to get them to be vaguely as safe as a modern building.
It's tradeoffs all the way down!
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/28/opinion/stairwells-bu...
US apartments look ugly because the IBC has been picked over by every flavor of money grubbing business interests masquerading as concerned do gooders. Once you filter out all the options rendered financially noncompetitive by each of their bought and paid for rules there's only a few paths to a viable building. You might have a dozen megacorps buying windows from a dozen suppliers but those dozen times dozen theoretical options are the same thing in practice because that's what it takes to hit Leed Platinum (TM) or whatever.
Seriously. Go watch some 80s/90s movies that were set in the then present day. Those cube farms have more diversity of style and material than anything today.
Are the two elevators a code requirement as well?
See also: The Newby–McMahon Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_littlest_skyscraper Where they sort of want to use the upper floors. but it can barely fit one staircase, two would take up the entire floor, a building code quandary.