It's not necessary to reproduce all human abilities in recovering from emergencies because about half of crashes are caused by the human pilots in the first place. Just automating the routine things and letting it crash in exceptional cases could be safer than having a human that can save it in the exceptional cases but also mess up the routine things occasionally.

Although we have no idea how many potential crashes become near misses as a result of human intervention. For example a pilot initiating a go around in response to a runway incursion. I absolutely agree that most of those issues could be avoided with better technology. But that may require changes to all airports, all aircraft and perhaps even all airport vehicles. Suddenly every single approach is category iii, all the time without any alternative.

Is it really any different from a self driving car thats designed to pull over to the side of the road safely if its main functionality fails for an unexpected reason?

Yeah, aircraft can't pull over to the side of the road in a catastrophic failure, and aircraft manufacturers will not pay to have the unique actions that a human faced with death would take built into the aircraft systems.