I dunno. Where I grew up, it was commonplace for kids to ride in the bed of a pickup truck, with or without a topper - my best friend and I rode with his dad that way on a six-hour road trip to the next state over, and on the six-hour trip back. Absent a genuine miracle, any collision at highway speeds would've killed the both of us outright. But no one involved thought anything of it, because that was just what you did.
I'm sympathetic to the distaste for scolds robotic and otherwise, but on the other hand, sometimes the scolds are right.
I think the key is that when you're designing a scold, you should ask whether a user circumventing the scold is going to be more dangerous than an unscolded user.
I'm reminded of a prior employer who didn't want us doing nontrivial networking at our desks, so they used STP traffic as a sort of canary. If you plugged in a switch that was smart enough to be running STP, your port would be disabled for 30 minutes.
So of course, we puzzled it out with wireshark, disabled STP, and created a monster by running network cables over the cube partitions. Sometime later we accidentally brought the network to its knees with the fallout of a switching loop (which is what STP prevents).
As a policy, it was like if you needed to pass a breathalyzer in order to put on your seatbelt.
At first I thought you were referring to shielded twisted pair cables for Ethernet, then I realized you were talking about the spanning tree protocol for switches.
The point is not that [bad thing] isn't bad. It's that scolding is the wrong way to go about it. How would your friend's dad have reacted to a stranger at the gas station yelling at him about the kids in the bed?
A better approach is friendliness, and gently pointing out how dangerous it is. "Hey man - careful with those kids. My neighbor died that way growing up - might be worth pulling them into the cab" is more likely to get a "Really? Dang, yea, you're right"
I'm sympathetic to the distaste for scolds robotic and otherwise, but on the other hand, sometimes the scolds are right.