There’s a very high chance that the driver would have been fine if they had been actively driving. How would you think about this if the brakes failed? The steering system? Just because there are other accidents it doesn’t mean that Tesla can’t potentially be blamed for killing this person because of the low maturity of their system.
Blamed yes! Absolutely! Put to the fires to figure out the fault and fix it forever, definitely! Insurance should be paying out and checks for criminal intent followed as it would normally be for a human
Should it stop all progress though, no. No way. Not by a long shot.
Here's another difference - The fix to this issue, unless it's a standard mechanical failure that any other car might have, will fix this issue in all of their cars. A human driver may still right this second lock their wheels in a skid and t-bone another car. The ability for the car to pump the brakes to slow more rapidly had to be a hardware fix rolled out over decades in the form of ABS. With autonomous cars for this to (hopefully) never be an issue again it's tomorrow's software patch