I don't think mechanical engineering is more professional now than it was 50 years ago. If anything its less so, with execs calling on Engineers to wing it, and getting sign off on shoddy designs.

Airline accidents and deaths have steadily declined for 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...

Car crash death rates in the US have been declining for 50 years in both total number and per-capita rates (except for an uptick that started in 2020, presumably some knock-on effects from covid): https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... -- 40,990 deaths in 2023 vs. 54,052 deaths in 1973; 12.06 vs 25.51 per 100k population

Car fuel efficiency has ~doubled since 1975: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-...

Airline fuel efficiency has quadrupled since 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...

Corn yields per acre have doubled since 1975: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren...

Lithium-ion batteries didn't practically exist in 1975.

Modern blue LEDs (and thus white LEDs) didn't exist until 1990.

The entire personal computing industry. The Internet. Search engines. LLMs. Cellular networks. Neodymium magnets. Reusable orbital launch vehicles. Genetically modified crops. mRNA vaccines. CRISPR.