The lights should be timed so that you don't have to do that if you are driving the posted speed, but I know that's not always true.

No doubt but I think it’s two fold. Lights stink in that so many are setup not for safety so they rip through the yellow quick as possible. Second, I don’t think of these as hard breaking even but I am sure from a data perspective the cutoff is probably correct. Hard invokes a vision of an emergency brake event. These apps really capture any medium to hard brake event.

It is not possible to time lights that way over any significant distance in a multi-way fabric of traffic.