Virtually all systems protect again shortcircuit at the breaker lever. Japan mostly has no ground but a RCD/GFCI for the whole house.
Basically how this works is that it checks if all the current leaving on the live wire is also returning on the neutral wire. If the current returning on the neutral is less than the one leaving then a part of the current must have found another way to get to ground (through your body for example) and it breaks the circuit hopefully before any danger could happen.
Now this doesn't make ground useless, there are 2 different protection systems that work in different ways, and sometimes protect in different scenarios too, the RCD is also an active protection that can and fail, compared to ground wich is passive.
Having both is ALWAYS safer
Fair point, thing is there just exists a better way of doing small ungrounded plugs like phone chargers, I honestly haven't used a British phone charger but from what I saw they seem pretty bulky compared to what I have