What's the point of a 1-min death penalty when you can pause and Respawn at Checkpoint to avoid it?

This feels like another one of those things that was grandfathered in that doesn't make any sense. Possibly never made any sense but is made more obvious in a game with pausing and respawning.

Dying anywhere in PoE or P2 already has a time cost that puts you behind (you have to run back, or restart the fight). What exactly is a second penalty of 1 minute achieving? It only serves to add extra distance between runners, making a race less tight and less interesting.

I agree that they should disable pause on races. But even though they didn't, 1-minute penalty still makes sense because top runners usually have much lower eHP than the expected on a normal gameplay, so simple attacks can cause HK in many cases, making it hard to detect those bad moments before things actually go south.

Sargetwo's fight against Doryani on the first race is a pretty good example.
https://youtu.be/degvs12mMX0?si=vH2HW9YWT5tgWSWR&t=11682