For good reason: if your priority is safety moving foward, you don't want people hiding information about incidents because they are concerned about repercussions.
Right, and you get different answers when you ask different questions too.
In the UK there's a case where the RAIB (accident investigators) concluded that systemically it was not possible for the human doing the job to ensure that particular accident (resulting in the death of a rail passenger) doesn't happen. So they made recommendations for how to prevent it in future on that basis.
But the human who was actually there doing the job was prosecuted, successfully and I believe sentenced to prison, because (prosecutors made the argument) regardless of whether it was technically true that it might have happened anyway, the death did happen, and it did happen while the accused wasn't strictly doing everything by the book.
The NTSB runs as a "blameless postmortem" org. Their findings are to be used to change systemic processes.