When you're identifying threats in a brief, you're prioritizing things to maintain vigilance for once you get going, and "unfamiliarity" is one of these things and a well-known and talked-about threat. So is bad signage, so is weather that could obscure identifiers like the lines and markings (snow packed surfaces, standing water, fog, etc etc) causing you to get lost. The stakes are high, much higher than a super-pranged wing, a runway incursion being the most obvious. In this accident, people in that building could have easily been killed.
You can't really equate briefing yourself on your route in a car to this. Missing your turn-off in a car and having to go back is not the same thing as inadvertently winding up on a runway under a landing or rolling-out aircraft in the dark (or this incident). If those were the stakes when you checked your route in a car, where missing your turn means not simply turning around in embarrassment but being T-boned by a truck killing everyone or driving off a cliff, you would check your route, check your progress a LOT more strictly along the way, and slow down at the first hint of doubt as to where you are.
Part of airmanship is managing distractions and maintaining priorities sometimes by adjusting what can be adjusted (delaying a checklist, telling someone to stby, etc) as necessary. It's what we do.