While the Ethiopian crew did have the overspeed warning going off, it was well below the "do not exceed" and "max dive" speeds.
I'm not sure whether that was being modeled by the simulator, or if the simulation's model of trim wheel force is a correct one.
It wasn't. Boeing's already admitted that their simulators don't correctly emulate the forces on the trim wheel.
Climb-out from Adis Ababa (a hot and high airport) means you've got precious little excess in terms of sacrificial power to begin with. The MAX 8 could only take-off at all due to an unusually long runway as I recall.
Now, would you point your nose down knowing that you may not be able to point it back up again?
This obviously wouldn't work in cases like the Ethiopian, where the plane had very little height over ground due to the high mountains around the airport.
Edit: the point isn't that the maneuver had prevented the accident, but that its existance in the flight manuals shows that it was known that the trim forces could be higher than what the pilots could apply to the trim wheels.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/what-passengers-expe...
(Still, they could have asked ATC for an speed reading or used other measurements to convince themselves that it was safe to slow down.)
Being reluctant to push the nose down when in a bad situation would cause pilots of any aircraft to fail their first hour of stall training.
It's more worrying that, since the procedure was removed from manuals and training, the pilots might simply not have realized that it would help.
That simulation would have ended in a crash if they didn't abort it.
So the pilots strength did not seem to matter and the situation was about as bad as it gets.
And even that may not be enough.
It's quite plausibly physically impossible if the pilot happens to be less strong than this one, or if the aircraft's situation is worse than this simulator's.
In particular, the Ethiopian flight was in extreme overspeed (if I recall, past the max safe structural speed for the plane!), which increases all of these forces. I'm not sure whether that was being modeled by the simulator, or if the simulation's model of trim wheel force is a correct one.
There's certainly no guarantee that a pilot can produce the force required to relieve aerodynamic load on the stabilizer here. It's a purely mechanical system.