Without labor laws to back something like this up, all it does is get engineers fired. Non-software engineering fields do have such laws, I believe. An MBA cannot make a civil engineer build a bridge that is unsafe because they want to save money. After all, it's the project engineer's signature on the final work. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) On the other hand, a large proportion of startups are doing something illegal or unethical and the only recourse for the engineer there is to quit or be fired. In some egregious cases, that may be worth it. Mostly, it's not. That's how our labor system is set up. I've always said, if you want to kill someone, start a corporation. It's the easiest way to get have someone else do it for you and get away with it. Anything less than murder in business is not even a consideration (unless the business gets punished which it most likely won't be).
I am a structural EIT. Industry focus on safety is paramount. Seniority is very much respected so there are almost no young MBAs and they exist almost exclusively at the corporate level. Only a full engineer can legally stamp off on the final drawings and the accompanying calculations and I've never really seen a business type ever try to interfere in that.
Aerospace regulates software and hardware. Software standard is DO-178B. Thanks to it, the systems get great quality assurance. A common thing that emerged from that are partitioning RTOS's that separate critical and untrustworthy stuff. They also usually have trusted boot. The cheapest CPU I saw supporting those was a Freescale one for $4 a piece in quantities of 100 units.
So, yeah, even in softwarw one can do as you suggest. Multiple times it's been done with things improving across the board. In DO-178B, an additional effect is an ecosystem of tooling, reusable components, and consultants sprang up to make each project a bit cheaper and less risky.
