Absolutely human stampede events happen. What the article is pointing out is the majority of related deaths are preventable, as are the stampede events themselves.

Typically people don’t just fall over and get trampled to death. Instead, doors don’t open the right way, egress paths are blocked, there are tripping hazards, poor signage, poor crowd control, etc, which leads to incidents where people are hurt or killed. It happens but it’s easily prevented.

Edit: I now work in a related field, so this is kinda my jam. It’s wild.