It matters a lot because a possible moment’s inattentiveness can be made sound like one lasting for much longer — an attentive driver that could have had a momentary lapse (or blinded by the sun) made sound like they were not attentive during the whole drive.
I’m not so worried about the immediate seconds leading up to the crash being misreperesented because as you say there the driver’s inattentiveness seems likely if they really took no action. But this lack of detection can and in my view has been used in these instances to form a narrative over a period of time... and that is much more likely to be completely misleading when not put into context properly.
With such narrative, every single drive most of us (without defeat devices) have on AP where we hold the steering wheel with both hands as recommended can be made sound like we didn’t hold the wheel repeatedly and thus were dangerous drivers, when in fact the only issue was that the torque sensing didn’t detect our two hands. Ironically those dangerously only using one hand or a defeat device would sound like better drivers in this narrative.
Tesla could explain that the hand detection is far from perfect but of course they never do in these instances. One suspected reason would be they feel it helps the narrative to cast more suspicion on the driver instead. Hands were repeatedly not detected for many, many miles...
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