To argue that its okay to include them because of a Halo Warthog, smashing cars through stone walls, or the unrealistic distances one can jump and survive unscathed in Forza, is dishonest, and tantamount to arguing its okay to include them in SIM racers due to the game's HUD, chase cam, and the magic ability to toggle whether your vehicle can take damage, or consume fuel or not.
Nope. You can false equivalency an entire novel's worth of words all you want, but that's not the case.
You're drawing an arbitrary line because
you don't like something. That's fine — we all have our own tastes — but you're trying to justify it as some sort of logical conclusion, when it isn't: it's just tastes. You're okay with a game employing a rolling metal peacock with 2500hp, or something with a
hypothetical laser propulsion system — some overgrown plastic bricks aren't any more ridiculous.
Just because a game has certain things about it that sets it apart from absolute reality, it doesn't therefore warrant throwing all logic and standards out the window. Because arcade or not, all non-satirical games have to have standards. You wouldn't see a spaceship as a vehicle in a WWII FPS game, and you wouldn't find visually detailed monsters in a kid's cartoon karting game neither.
Here's another arbitrary line.
People can use the playground games events or the halo showcase as arguments regarding realism all they like, but that'd be insinuating that all players generally interact with such things in the first place, rather than trying to ignore all the game's tacked-on nonsense and play it as realistically as it'll permit them.
Remember folks, if you don't like something in a game, it's "tacked-on nonsense".
I'm not going to harp on the idea of playing FH4 as realistically as you feel, because I've done the same thing from time to time. But it's not
all I do in the game, because that'd be intentionally ignoring a solid chunk of it on the grounds of some sort of sim racing elitism. Back just before release, I was streaming on Mixer when an old friend messaged me. She had been watching the stream and really liked the cruising portion she had seen, which was impressive as she wasn't much of a car person. But she also liked me trying to climb to the highest peak in the Unimog, and launching the bike-engine-swapped Peel over said peak. Why?
Because it was fun.
I could sort of understand all the outrage over the LEGO expansion if this was Motorsport. But it isn't. This is MS' big racing game, big in the sense that it reaches a lot of different demographics. If LEGO cars are what it takes to draw some people in, and then they get hooked on the other stuff that's in the game, leading them down a road of exploration into the more serious portions of the genre, then win-freaking-win. Racing games
need it.