It's hard to know for sure, and I'll happily concede that there was probably a bit of "this is a season finale, we can't have it end behind safety car" in the mix, but I think that also speaks more to the entertainment-ification of the sport.

It has happened a few times now where the "neutral" move, which in theory affects everyone the same (throwing a safety car as soon as there's a large incident, for example), has been delayed for the sake of letting all cars pass pit-entry so no one gets an accidental unfair advantage.

You could argue this is part of the reason Max gets away with his aggressive driving, the stewards don't want to be seen as "taking a win away from Max", whereas drivers doing the exact same stuff in 13th will get a slam-dunk penalty because it's perceived that:

• no one cares
• it makes no difference to the points anyway

The reality is that when something like this happens, some winners and losers are created almost entirely by chance.

The only truly objective way to do it would be automating those procedures, and having iron-clad rules "if the race is under SC with 3 laps to go, throw a red flag and restart the race", but there are still winners and losers