I think the point was that we know it's safe (e.g. due to the skin barrier as you mentioned) and we're not likely to change our opinion about soap safety in a d

I think the point was that we know it's safe (e.g. due to the skin barrier as you mentioned) and we're not likely to change our opinion about soap safety in a decade. In other words, despite there being many cases of egregious mistakes in safety assumptions due to our bad understanding of science (and/or malice) in the past, we're tempted nowadays to err on the side of caution and probably overestimate the ratio of chemicals we use in our daily life that turned out to be bad, to the ones that we got right. Sizeable parts of the populace nowadays associates the word chemical with unhealthy. Yet, they buy products that have the word "natural" on it, crafted by mixing and processing products of natural origin. But nature is full of chemicals. Mixing them and processing them, grinding them, heating them up, etc, is what chemical processing is about.