This feature isn't a out rewarding poor driving it's about leveling the playing field and giving the user a more realistic experience.
Realistic in what terms?
If i drive my RWD car in the snowy road and for some reason overlook the icy bit, or any undulation, I'll spin out and there's a chance i'll end up upside down in the woods. Do I have a rewind option? But does it really matter? When I got an RWD car in the first place I knew that some random things like that can, and will happen. People just tend to get only good things, and put away the bad things that comes with the package.
On any amateur race track theres huge chance you can be rearended by someone, or your brakes would suddently fail. And when it happens, well, too bad for you. You ruined yourself a race, a car, and probably health too. Now transfer it into safe room with a rig and people dare to complain about ruined races... duh.
And I agree with you about damage model, it needs to be less rewarding. And gearbox need failing if you mishift. Afterall, it's just so much more fun watching a replay of you crashing, even if it ruined a race, than watching a video replay sitting in a moving chair... and yeah, watching that is really part of the fun process of simracing for me. I remember in Rally Trophy, when I ruined the stage, at least I enjoyed watching my car bouncing off the ditch or some roadside stones, just for the sake of realistic physics behaviour, that I haven't seen in any mainstream racing games before.
And the more you use bad AI as an excuse for rewind, the more chances that there'll be rewind everywhere, and AI will be still bad, if not worse. Make the rewind function is like a shortcut to deal with the problem which is much more complicated to solve properly.
Take the aliasing thing. A lot of modern games use DOF effect just to hide the aliasing of objects or shadows in the distance.