We never could depend on it. But when a machine is broken, the solution of throwing out the entire machine and getting a new one may not solve the problems, and there's a high risk of having new and worse problems. The better initial plan is to figure out the parts that are causing the failure, analyse why those components broke, and adjust the design with more robust parts and better error handling.
The problem isn't always the laws, many of them are very pro-society. The problem is which laws are created or challenged, by whom, and how often. Currently laws are prioritised by money when they need to be prioritised by impact and scale. The thing we can no longer depend on is our economic system.