I find "Sometimes I fuck up and misjudge my damage output, causing me to waste a meter" a TON less annoying than the retail alternative of
"Sometimes happy birthdaying an opponent gets you killed because death pause drops your inputs and then they block your cHP and punish you hard"
There are already countless other possibilities to "waste a bar" because you misjudged damage, none of those will (or can) get fixed, .. I dunno.
Yeah it's not nice, and I would prefer if it wasn't there, but if it's this or retail behaviour, I will always vote for this.
At some point the life/damage will stop changing; then it should be quite feasible to judge whether your last special is going to kill or not.
E: And yeah, for most specials it's probably doable to wait them out while buffering the Super motion, and then only hitting KK/PP if it didn't kill -
That's just something nobody is currently used to doing, as it wasn't ever necessary to try.