> Societies do this because it is widely believed that it would be impossible for various things to happen without it.
It is not society's business to allow or disallow different kinds of contracts between private parties. If I know that corporation's investors don't have personal liability and still decide to go into business with them, it's my personal decision to accept this risk and not society's. If I so please, I could go into even riskier deals, up to just gifting them my money. It could be a stupid decision, but it's my decision to make, not something that "society" can allow me to do – actually, not society, but it's worst enemy, the government.
Of course, some governments act out of assumptions that you stated, but it's nothing more than just justification for tiranny.
You misunderstand the reach of limited liability. It caps liability not merely w.r.t. consumers/vendors/employees etc, but to anyone whatsoever, even a person who has no relationship with a corporation and did not enter into a contract with it.
You don't seem to understand the history of corporations at all.
They don't exist and were not created to sell potentially risky products to eager consumers. They were created to engage in capital-requiring efforts (notably expeditions, but also large scale resource extraction and industrial projects) that would not happen without the personal liability release.
They would not happen because the potential for liability related to the endeavor was clear to all (i.e. people would likely die, and vast amounts of money might be lost).
But societies (and notably royal families) wanted those things to happen, and so they create corporate charters to encourage them to do so.
We could make do without corporate charters, but then we'd also likely be making do without most of things they enabled, because essentially nobody would have had the guts to bet their own personal liability on what were clearly risky and dangerous endeavors.
I know history of corporations pretty well, from hundred years war and british and dutch maritime corporation's, thank you. But history is not ethics: what is and what ought to be are two very different things, not to be confused. Explaining how and why something hapenned historically has only tangential relation to how it should happen and how should we view it from an ethical standpoint, and I was talking about the latter, not the former.
So you're in the camp of "we'll do without silicon fabrication plants entirely, thank you very much", because I can pretty much guarantee you that the liability that creating the initial versions of this technology would have ensured insufficient capital to proceed.
As another comments notes, corporate limited liability is not just, or even primarily, about liability towards your business partners. Build a factory, pollute the water, and without limited liability, you are ruined (which some would argue is the way things ought to be).
It is not society's business to allow or disallow different kinds of contracts between private parties. If I know that corporation's investors don't have personal liability and still decide to go into business with them, it's my personal decision to accept this risk and not society's. If I so please, I could go into even riskier deals, up to just gifting them my money. It could be a stupid decision, but it's my decision to make, not something that "society" can allow me to do – actually, not society, but it's worst enemy, the government.
Of course, some governments act out of assumptions that you stated, but it's nothing more than just justification for tiranny.