Storing your wealth in the safest available way is certainly not irresponsible. I think it would be the opposite.
Giving your wealth to a stranger, with a history full of strangers going bankrupt and getting hacked, is certainly not the safest. Sure. But nobody here is talking about giving your wealth to a... stranger (?).
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Meanwhile, storing your own physical keys involves risks, and people lose their Bitcoin this way all of the time.
Because they do it the wrong way. They are reckless and store them on Internet connected devices, with closed-source operating system, potentially affected with malware, and do not even verify the binaries. People who secure their wallet, the right way, and have lost them due to $5 wrench attacks are outnumbered by the number of victims who lost all their savings on Mt. Gox, FTX, BlockFi, Kucoin, Bitfinex and an endless list of others. I get that, but lots of people don't want to be bothered with all of that stuff and would rather pay somebody to do it for them. That's why people don't store their life savings in paper bills in their own home and there are these things called "bank"
.All things being equal, something secured by highly paid experts who have millions of dollars in resources and intense processes to help them should be far more secure than what any individual could possible come up with.
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You're mistaken in the sense that you think a third party safeguards your wealth with legislation, as with houses or bank accounts, but this is different. It's easier to steal, and there is no insurance.
That was actually an implicit point of my OP here: that Coinbase could never be as safe as storing your USD in a US bank since they are not insured. No digital asset (or indeed, no thing at all) is as safe as USD in a US bank under the insurance max. But perhaps Coinbase (or some competitor, or some government) could offer such an insurance and that would be a valuable thing since it would make digital assets as safe as USD potentially.