To be fair, in some ways it maps to Age of Sail values. However, in any higher tech society, I suspect the proles would often know enough to recognize a terrible bet.
It's not so much the sensibilities I don't get in that model, its the reality of how you have a standard passage type (which means broad use and many vessels using them) in any sort of environment with the kind of failure rates we're talking about.
Unless the 3I has a lot of forced transportees, criminals being exiled to red zone planets, or other weird things that would normalize this form of travel, then it just wouldn't happen on the scale you'd need for it to become a standard passage mechanism.
Maybe the 3I *is* that sort of nasty place. Maybe we now know why there are unexplained Red Zones... Imperial Internal Security drop off points for inconvenient individuals.... (Dark Imperium, anyone?)