The American legal system places much more emphasis on acts you may have committed than omissions, and tends to avoid compelling action.

So yes, in an American court, disabling a proven safety feature is significantly worse than simply purchasing a vehicle without the feature.

The safety driver failed at their job, but the NTSB clearly lays significant blame for that failure on Uber, who should know well that humans are poorly suited to monitoring automated systems, and committed acts and omissions that increased the likelihood of an accident.