Think about that: children have died from 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘴. It's easy to be smug power user complaining about design when you only consider how you interact with things.
This very thing happened to me decades ago: I walked into parents' bedroom to find my fearless younger brother, ignoring my yells, climbing up the handles on the front of my father's dresser. I yelled for my parents but I couldn't stop him fast enough. As the dresser began to tip I got between him and it and pushed upward, both removing him from the dresser and tipping it back to rest.
I was truly shaken and astonished that this child might have killed himself, since I knew that the top drawer was filled with my father's most valuable (and heaviest) WWII memorabilia and that the entire dresser, about 5 feet tall, was hardwood with decorative protrusions on the front.
Makes you wonder how we as humans haven't evolved the ability to innately perceive being crushed by large objects.
I know I become hyper aware of any small black specks in my peripheral vision since they resemble spiders that could have posed a threat to our ancestors so we evolved these heightened senses to avoid them.
And in nature you do not really have much big objects that could fall on you if you climb them.
Maybe a large boulder loose ... but they are very rare in my experience. So I guess it makes sense we are not prepared for it. What is much more likely, a loose rock which breakes off at climbing .. we are prepared for. Instinct reflexes are pretty fast in that case, I noticed ..
A cabinet being wobbly and starting to tip over towards you should feel pretty dangerous I'd imagine, we have various biological mechanisms that detect balance [1].
I would hope the ability to sense loss of balance equilibrium would innately result in having the strong urge to bail from that activity to sturdier ground, given you knew you could safely land on the ground without a worse outcome.
A tipping cabinet takes much longer to fall unlike a rock dislodging when you are climbing the side of a cliff in nature. Maybe it is simply a blind spot in our evolution like you suggest, evolution never optimized us for this edge case scenario not experienced in the wild.
As a parent, this is one of the silent killers that haunts me. We only have one dresser and I have it tilted back... but I should also strap it to the wall.
I was a PICU nurse before I started writing software for a living. A surprising number of kids also get seriously injured by pulling TV sets/cabinets over onto themselves. Affixing things to walls definitely a good plan.
Also PSA for the holidays: fence pools, use your reversing camera and know where your kids are before backing out of the driveway, and that dishwasher detergent does horrible things to kids (airway/oesophagus) and people tend to keep it down low for some reason.
Just the other day my toddler fell out of a shopping cart. I never paid much attention to the warning signs because I'm always right there pushing the cart, this time though I'd moved a few feet away to wrangle his older sister and he stood up in the cart. I immediately moved back towards him but I was too late. Normally he has great balance but as he reached out to me his weight shifted causing the cart to roll forward and he toppled right out. He landed right on his face in the most horrifying moment of my life. Thankfully he's all right (giant bump and a black eye) but it easily could have been fatal. I'll never leave him unrestrained in a cart again.
This very thing happened to me decades ago: I walked into parents' bedroom to find my fearless younger brother, ignoring my yells, climbing up the handles on the front of my father's dresser. I yelled for my parents but I couldn't stop him fast enough. As the dresser began to tip I got between him and it and pushed upward, both removing him from the dresser and tipping it back to rest.
I was truly shaken and astonished that this child might have killed himself, since I knew that the top drawer was filled with my father's most valuable (and heaviest) WWII memorabilia and that the entire dresser, about 5 feet tall, was hardwood with decorative protrusions on the front.