So if you walk into an electronics lab and see a piece of equipment with squee 😍 all these cool dials! 😍 and 🥰 🥰 lights!!! 🥰 🥰 and a threatening 😠 sign that says "don't touch," and you turn a dial just a little, but you totally didn't hurt anything, who was in the wrong now that the equipment isn't calibrated? The person for making the threatening sign? The person for leaving their equipment where any toddler could get to it? Or the the toddler for not having agency enough to know not to touch something that doesn't belong to them? Are you going to pay for the engineering time it took a team to calibrate the equipment for a First Article Test the next week? You're going to pay for the customers to fly back home after flying in on a Sunday for a Monday/Tuesday test that now can't happen?
Just because you don't assign a value to a golf club doesn't mean it doesn't have a value to the person who bought it, trained with it, and went through the effort to carry it somewhere to play golf. And golf clubs or engineering labs aside, you don't seem like you've ever had something broken by someone else before you even got a chance to use it. Are you going to refund the guy's once in a lifetime golf vacation because you don't know what forces a graphite shaft can/can't withstand? Are you going to replace his grandpa's headcover that he uses because it reminds him of his deceased grandpa teaching him golf?
The engineering lab would obviously have access controls because of people who don't understand what they're doing. Someone's golf clubs on a golf course, within sight of the owner and within asking distance to see if it's OK to look at one can usually rely on common sense and etiquette. Usually...