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@mmccarthy
Yeah the whole "why don't they just not follow the rules now when we've done that before", is understandable, but I'd rather they stuck to the rules regardless.
I think the crash was on the penultimate lap, so they'd have had to go around again. And I think making calls on whether or not to throw a red flag/safety car based on current race positions/laps remaining etc. is a big no-no (Wolff asking Masi not to call a safety car at Abu Dhabi 2021 was way out of line for that reason) IMO.
I was pretty miffed with the Sainz penalty, but they do assign penalties based on the incident itself without the result being taken into account. I'm more miffed as they tend to be pretty light on assigning penalties for turn 1 incidents on the first lap, instead leaning heavily towards racing incident calls, but that doesn't seem to hold for restarts. That type of Sainz/Alonso crash is pretty much a given at Melbourne so it's not like it was particularly out of line.
I think if it wasn't for the issues after the race in Jeddah, this would be much less of a talking point. The FIA absolutely drop the ball pretty frequently on this sort of thing. But the mess on track did warrant a red flag, so there was going to be a restart. And with 2 laps left, chaos was pretty much a given.
Even if they introduced a rule like "the race ends if red flagged after 90% laps completed", it would still have been a bit of a let down of a result. I think the FIA made the right call, it's just that all possible calls were varying levels of shit IMO.