I didn’t read the article either, but the last 757 rolled out of the factory in October of 2004.
They are well built safe planes. Most life and hull losses were from hijackings and collisions. Two were hijacked on 9/11.
The systemic problem with safety is, to get really effective at it, you have to have paid the price for not being safe… hard and costly lessons… then when you get good at it, over time, the high cost lessons fade into memory and complacency happens, beam counters push to cut costs, the older folks who lived through the high cost retire and die and you slip down the slope until another high cost lesson is learned.
This is the nature of man, when it comes to anything.