Alt is a crutch that some of the top score players take advantage of. Honestly most of them are terrible if you get them into a knife fight
Alt is not a crutch, it's a historic and time tested ADVANTAGE, just like speed, and just like good SA.
I'd argue that "hair on fire" furballing is pretty much game gaming, as the pilots who rely on that wouldn't do the same if their real lives were on the line. On the opposite side of that coin, a nice unseen bounce or a calculated B&Z from altitude is a "risk" most of us would take if we were literally risking our real ONE life.
And by the way, although I crave the "easy" unseen kill (not always easy when there are icons), and prefer a one- or two-pass boom and zoom kill to a 5-minute turn til you puke scrap... I'm far from helpless in a knife-fight. Just last week, I killed an Oscar "knifefighting" while in a
damaged SBD Dauntless, and there was a Ki-45 Toryu helping out the Ki driver. There I had no choice but to mix it up, as I surely wasn't able to run for it.