Most cars used to be ridiculously easy to steal, and people dealt with this situation in a variety of ways. Suing the car manufacturers was not one of these methods.
I don’t think your phone analogy is at all comparable. A phone catching fire during what anyone might consider normal use isn’t the same kind of product design issue as a car that is no easier to steal than most cars were for most of the history of cars. The old covertible that I had years ago would have been way easier to steal than these cars, for example, both because of simple wiring and simple access to the car interior.
We can pass the blame for this issue around pretty widely. I don’t think we should just pin all the blame on the car makers
Right, but ‘steak’ does mean a little more than that. It also would indicate a particular kind of cut of meat, which would generally indicate minimal connective tissue, tenderness, location, etc. Now, you could say “well, all that is irrelevant to this discussion”, but to an extent is really is relevant. We are talking about how word meanings are being changed and how that influences consumer choice. Imagine if we started to see companies using the word 'vegetarian ’ in a way that simply meant ‘containing vegetables’, regardless of meat content. Already terms like ‘organic’ are nearly meaningless in some markets. This sort of thing happens.
Imagine a company creating a half-meat and half-plant based burger and calling the product ‘Vegan Beef’. Who could be confused, some might argue here, about this product? - it has ‘beef’ right in the name.
Strict guidelines can also protect consumers.
To return to the original point, the term ‘steak’ in a food context has already become nearly meaningless (or at least has so many conflicting meanings that it has lost most of its usefulness). ‘Milk’ is heading that way. ‘Organic’ is without much meaning in the US. Would you like ‘meat-free’ labels allowed on foods that had absolutely no muscle-tissue content, but did contain animal organ, bone, and fat content?