At large scale you can't hire enough competent people. And scale x low tolerance for error means you can't rely on humans even if they are competent. To fix that you basically have to introduce process. Things are checked and controlled at numerous points, using blanket processes that often don't make any sense for the specific scenario at hand but are needed for something superficially similar. People end up in hierarchies of approval. And that's without even considering regulatory compliance which often simply mandates things at a blanket level because micro-auditing each individual part of a big company is essentially an impossible proposition.

Engineers have the best chance because we have it in our hands to automate so much, but still, we just haven't figured out a better way to do it I think.

I'm not saying that adding additional layers of process is always the right answer--there's obviously a cost to adding more process so there needs to be a balance and a continual reassessment of which processes are worth keeping. But in my experience, the intention has always been good: to avoid mistakes, problems, and failures that we've experienced in the past.