Your engineer example is particularly silly. In a country with 4000 banks, there is absolutely no reason -- other than pure laziness or stupidity -- for an engineer's personal assets in checking/savings/MM/CD accounts to exceed FDIC insurance limits on any particular ownership category at any particular institution. Ie, it's not $250K of total liquid assets. It's $250K, per ownership category, per institution, and there are at least 4,000 and up to 32,000 institution+category pairs depending on your situation. So between $1,000,000,000 and $8,000,000,000 of coverage is hypothetically possible per natural person, and at least several millions is pretty trivial. Source: I have more than $250K in FDIC insured accounts and it's all covered by FDIC and all of that cash is even held at the same institution (in different categories)! This isn't rocket science.

But you do have to pay your FDIC premiums, and call me a Rugged Individualist, but I don't think we should give rich VCs and tech founders free post facto insurance.

I know, I know, rugged individualism and responsibility is only for the poors. It's our job to bail out rich asshole VC bro, finance bro, and tech founder parasites.