There have been two major incidents around landing at SFO in the last decade, one involving fatalities.

Prioritising safety by requesting to land using ILS after a 12 hour flight should not be seen as 'punishing' everyone else.

It's not punishment. The reason air travel is so safe is because every near-miss is root-caused and policies are put in place to prevent the same cause from resulting in a future accident.

As they say, FAA rules are written in blood.

https://www.cfinotebook.net/notebook/rules-and-regulations/r...

I mean, yes. Every single time there’s an aviation incident there’s an extremely thorough investigation and generally a set of concrete recommendations to go along with it.

Pilots are human, automated systems fail, and the goal is to maximize safety because these fuckups mean that 200-300 people on a single plane might die (or more if a plane crashes into another or into a populated area) and these safety regulations have saved a lot of lives.