A living room made with concrete block walls would be extremely rare here, in most of North America houses are built out of wood. In the East where brick and masonry is much more common there will still be wood studded walls on the inside providing a gap for the required insulation as well as electrical and plumbing. If the gap is less than a certain width (1 7/8" from memory) then the wire must be armored cable or in conduit. The only place you'd find exposed concrete walls is in a basement or garage, and again conduit or armored cable is required for obvious reasons.
I really feel like you're arguing for the sake of arguing, or at least being willfully ignorant of the differing construction methods here and not looking at a building from a holistic standpoint. Unless you can find examples (heck even one example?) of people being electrocuted in North American by ground faults in indoor wiring due to a lack of GFCI protection. Most circuits in homes here do not have GFCI protection at all, it is only used for receptacles that are within a certain distance of a sink, tub or other water source and outdoors. In a typical home you might have 15-20 circuits, in older homes one will be GFCI protected for the bathroom receptacles and newer homes will have at least 2 more for the kitchen receptacles and any receptacle in an unoccupied basement or garage must also be GFCI protected. In about 95% of cases this is done by a GFCI receptacle at the start of the run though GFCI breakers are available they are much more expensive and typically only used in high end homes and commercial buildings. It's only used when something connected to the circuit is expected to be used in or around a water source.
It's really a non-issue, ground faults in the wiring from the panel to the receptacle are something that's so rare that if it happens at all it would be considered a crazy fluke. I mean if you've got 10-20 non-GFCI circuits who's going to worry if one more has a few feet of cable in a wall that isn't protected from a bizarre edge case? Someone is negligent enough to run un-protected cable near enough to the surface that someone could hit it by hanging a picture? That's absolute madness, it's illegal to do so, and for a very good reason. No protection device should ever be relied on to prevent injury in such a case, the cable must be physically protected, if ground fault protection is used it is secondary protection like an airbag in a car. Just because you have an airbag doesn't mean you don't bother wearing a seatbelt and just drive as carelessly as you like because you've got a device to protect you. It increases your chance of surviving an incident but it is far better to prevent the incident in the first place.