I never understood the presidential pardon. It's like America is basically admitting it has no faith in their own justice system. Or want a cheat code to skip it lol.

Complex systems don't pop out of thin air.

The US form of government is highly based on the existing British one and the British King had the ability to pardon and so that was copied over.

I do think it makes a lot of sense to do things like mass-pardon people for things that are no longer crimes (i.e. weed legalization) but I really don't see how singling out cases is correct since the supreme court already can do that.

To be fair, the power was added as a failsafe to be used for legitimate clemency in cases of judicial overreach which is also a concern. I do believe it was added with good intentions.

But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes.

They were, of course, wrong.

At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.