As to why it doesn't burn up before leaving the fire itself? Usually that means there wasn't enough oxygen to burn with all the carbon. Oxygen is the other ingredient of making a flame. When it has left the direct flame, it then needs to be hot enough to ignite even if there is now an abundance of nearby oxygen. When you see sparkly embers up in the flame, that's a bit of hot carbon finally being close enough to some oxygen to burn.

Just wanted to add a note that most of our cells are usually only part-way exposed to the alcohol. The rest of the surrounding tissue provides much of the pathways for nutrients, liquids, and other necessities for our cells to continue existing, cleverly regulated by the body as usual. Towards an exposed surface, most of our tissues have some sort of protection from the local environment like mucous in the lungs or the epidermal layers of the skin. If these defenses break down, the infrastructure layers also act as a means to repair or replace any damaged individual cells. Any tissue that doesn't routinely come into contact with the external environment will tend to lack the defensive features and be more susceptible to alcohol, but by the time alcohol filters to those tissues it is usually quite a bit more dilute.

Some biological cycles are easier to up regulate or down regulate so can be more adaptive for the baseline to err slightly in the direction that is easier to correct. Just let the outside stimulus do its magic to keep things sensible.

Wouldn't that run into increased shift handoff errors?

The goal post moves every time. Any time fascists have sufficient power against the out group, the in group gets smaller so they have enough scary opponents to fuel the outrage. Also why as things improve, they find the newest weak link punching bag. It's important to protect that weak link they find because many of us are only a few rungs up the ladder of acceptable to them. We let our brothers and sisters get crushed and we're next.