I was going to comment on MSFS2020's Active Pause as well. It's a curious implementation, but I always assumed the behaviour was intentional. After all, there's a "regular" pause mode as well.

You gotta learn and understand its quirks, though. As long as your flight state is rock stable (e.g. on Auto Pilot) and/or you're not fiddling with the controls while paused, it's pretty much always worked fine for me.

I've also used its interactivity to my advantage and saved the plane from an otherwise unsaveable flight state, e.g. by gaining airspeed while paused.

> which had an “active pause” feature that they hyped as a big innovation for that release

So my memory might be playing me a trick, but wasn't that already the case in FS2002 and 2004? I seem to remember using the pause as a kid to look at my plane under every angle.