W/r/t your life insurance finds out your safety equipment was in violation of posted rules...and they pin loss of life on it

This is quite possible, "contributory negligence" is claimed to reduce the award value. IMHO an insurance company is likely to use this as a bargaining chip, regardless of what actually happened, and let your lawyer argue that the accident was fatal regardless of helmet quality.
The question of "is a helmet that expired yesterday more dangerous than one still legal?" will be fun to watch. These are frequently decided on this basis: "what engineering data and destructive test results were used to determine exactly when a helmet has decayed significantly? (exactly 730 days, not 729)".
The surprising answers come back:
1. "we were told..."
2. "we just made it up, after that big donation from the helmet manufacturers"
3. "none ever actually failed from a crash, but we had to say something"
4. "we read about a helmet settlement in Kazakhstan in 1986 from a WW2 helmet, so we made it different"

Wasn't the best best money helmet can buy really helpful to Dale Earnhardt?