I'm not sure that you can say speed "clearly impacted" race safety, vs., say, snow conditions, fencing, luck, athlete preparation, course set (i.e., placement of fall zones, working with terrain, etc.) or any other factor, unless your argument is that "any increase in speed carries an increase in risk", which is true, but a bit meaningless, since the goal is always to ski faster. Is there an inflection point somewhere, where the incremental risk with incremental speed gain increases? Maybe, perhaps even probably. But it's naive to think we actually know where it is (or even that it's constant year-to-year and not dependent on thousands of other factors). Correlation isn't causation, and the number of injuries this year in GS vs. previous is not statistically significant.
Times were about 7% lower. That does not mean ground speeds were 7% faster.
It's fun to say "ooh look, it's faster, and that's bad" but ... the set was legal, the winners were sending it and skiing close to full-arc down the pitch (which is nuts), and *nobody* was forced to go out of the start gate if they didn't think it was safe.
If we want to have a discussion about safety, and the merits of letting coaches/officials/media stand where they do inside the fence, hill prep, hill fencing, equipment, equipment prep, rules, etc., and how that all intersects (or should intersect) with course sets, I'm game, but ... this is world cup. These are world-class athletes hurling themselves down a mountain with sharp sticks on their feet with the sole goal of pushing their limits and trying to go faster. It's never going to be completely safe. There are going to be injuries. The set needs to be legal, and the venue needs to be set up so that it's "safe enough". Perhaps the standard for what's "safe enough" in the mind of the organizers and jury needs to be changed.
But the set also needs to test the field and separate the best skiers of the day. Risk/reward is part of that, and I'm glad to see it returning to GS.