Not really. From the hypervisor's point of view, there isn't a guarantee that the VM is running ssh, is running it on the typical port, that there's a valid log

Not really. From the hypervisor's point of view, there isn't a guarantee that the VM is running ssh, is running it on the typical port, that there's a valid log-in, etc. And again, the point of this is for VMs that are unresponsive, and that generally includes SSH. It is remarkably simple to get Linux into a state where SSH isn't going to allow you to log in, or log ins might take 10+ minutes to actually happen. Someone else mentions console access for these things, which is sadly missing in AWS. I'm not sure how you'd take something like console access (very dynamic, keyboard input, screen output? text?) and put it into an AWS API, though. (Their APIs tend to follow certain patterns.)