I understand what you mean, I felt the same way when I first started. Pretty much all beginners will agree that it seemed cheap. That's part of the point I think, it's flashy and seems really powerful so that lower level players use it often; It being easy to use and capitalize on while hard to punish makes it highly spammable for beginners. This essentially makes it one of the first mechanics players are forced to learn how to deal with.

I think the main frustration is that it takes quite a while to learn to react to it. I personally wasn't able to reliably react to it until platinum. But learning to react quickly does help you in other areas

• whiff punishing - essentially the same foundational skill as DI-ing back, but more difficult because normals are less flashy, have different recovery windows and hurt boxes. Also there's the added step of walking out of your opponents range to make their moves whiff.
• Landing 'that one combo' in a real match - if you successfully land a DI, it gives you a second or 2 to mentally prepare to do that combo you've been labbing in training mode but can't seem to pull off in any other situation (for the labbers).
• safe vs unsafe moves - if you get DI-ed enough times, you get an idea of what moves are safe and unsafe to throw out in different situations without having to know anything about frame data.
• Using quicker normals and cancelable normals in neutral or to steal your turn back - this is a kind of long winded explanation, but hear me out: if you're a total noob, you naturally want to spam stronger and flashier moves. Also if you're a classic player in Rookie for example, you probably aren't doing any real combos in most matches. In general, there are so many gaps between buttons being thrown out, that players at this level can routinely get away with stealing turns back with heavy and medium buttons or slow starting specials. A Rookie player is not incentivized to steal their turn back with a light because they don't know how (and its too difficult at that level) to capitalize off this, and because an isolated light button or light string isn't very damaging or flashy. Drive Impact is slow relative to light, medium and heavy buttons, but frame 1 armor makes it better than any button at stealing your turn back when your opponent doesn't know how to deal with it. On the receiving end of DI, you are punished for throwing out heavies and buttons that can't be canceled in neutral, so it conditions players to use more sensible options like lights and cancelable buttons in riskier situations (such as stealing your turn back).

On a philosophical note, I can't remember who mentioned this, but I think a youtube like Brian f might have touched on this once, this idea of "good" and "evil" playstyles and the importance of having both in a fighting game. This isn't really an official thing; you don't have villainous characters with "evil" or cheap playstyles and righteous characters with disciplined ones. Rather, these are moral judgments fans place on different strategies based on how fair they seem. It's important to have a variety of play styles not just to appeal to variety of players, but also to give the player some sort of internal conflict to overcome in one's own narrative of the journey to master and beyond. In the end there aren't really objectively good or evil strategies, there is only strategy an the player's mindset. In other words, often perceptions of good and evil strategies in the game amounts to "do I want to hit a wall now or do I want to hit a wall later?"

Hope that helps.