Lifeboats in particular were probably the wrong fix, not because of Eastland, which was just an unsafe ship and would doubtless have found some other excuse to kill everybody, but because lifeboat maintenance and testing causes injuries and occasionally deaths, while in the modern era the need to evacuate passengers to lifeboats grows smaller.
I think MAIB (the Marine [edited: this said Maritime but that's wrong] Accident Investigation Branch, a UK government agency) wrote a report about this at one point. In coastal waters particularly the ship's master is realistically never going to encounter a situation where abandoning to lifeboats is the right choice. Fire is the most likely reason to consider it, but modern vessels should be able to contain plausible fires well enough to reach safety, even if as a result the ship is damaged beyond economic repair. Just loading the passengers into lifeboats and putting the lifeboats into the sea is a pretty fraught endeavour, you will probably injure either a passenger or crew member doing it - and that's before any risk from being in a tiny boat out at sea.
I think MAIB (the Marine [edited: this said Maritime but that's wrong] Accident Investigation Branch, a UK government agency) wrote a report about this at one point. In coastal waters particularly the ship's master is realistically never going to encounter a situation where abandoning to lifeboats is the right choice. Fire is the most likely reason to consider it, but modern vessels should be able to contain plausible fires well enough to reach safety, even if as a result the ship is damaged beyond economic repair. Just loading the passengers into lifeboats and putting the lifeboats into the sea is a pretty fraught endeavour, you will probably injure either a passenger or crew member doing it - and that's before any risk from being in a tiny boat out at sea.