There's no single important thing— It's a combination of killing as many pathogens as you can with heat or chemicals, removing as much material as you can that bacteria feed on, and drying. Drying isn't going to do any good if your spoon is contaminated with hepatitis a, for example, and drying is much less important if you're really taking down the bacteria count by sanitizing it and don't have much for bacteria to eat in there. But if the spoon has been around the block and you're just throwing it in the dishwasher on a regular cycle, drying is a larger part of the risk reduction.
Honestly though, in home kitchens, you're waaaay more likely to get foodborne illnesses from accidental cross-contamination or time/temperature abuse of particularly risky ready-to-eat foods that people aren't as careful with as they are with meat— like cut melons and questionable been sprouts, cooked cut vegetables, cooked rice, and others. It's funny how careful people are with jarred mayonnaise, which is pretty indestructible. If that potato salad left out on the table at the picnic made you sick, it's the potatoes, not the mayonnaise.
As an aside: most people are completely wrong about what gave them food poisoning. To get a better idea, you need to look up specific symptoms and incubation periods... But contact tracing is the only way to be sure. And the most common— norovirus— could have been picked up anywhere. Even if you wash your hands right before eating, you could have gotten it from the seat you pulled out before sitting down, and alcohol isn't great at killing it. Working on restaurants, when someone said "you made me sick! I'm going to call the board of health!" I'd say "feel free. They're going to tell you to get tested to see what you have so they can compare it to other reports, and in the unlikely event that some of the other hundreds of other people who ate here when you did got the same illnesses, I'd want the board of health to know about that."