The strategy of "wait a bit longer" can be configured with an exact value for how long to wait via this recovery feature. However, given that you don't have any

The strategy of "wait a bit longer" can be configured with an exact value for how long to wait via this recovery feature. However, given that you don't have any information about the failure's permanence or whether it can be resolved by AWS staff without taking the host down I don't see why waiting indefinitely is a particularly good option. In some ways, I guess this answers my own question. Amazon doesn't know how long you might want to wait or if you have a VM that you would even want to have recovered, so configuring this lets you tell Amazon what your parameters around recovery should be.