The crew rest thing is interesting now that I’m on the blue side. I made as much fun of AF dudes and crew rest as any other but I can say the timelines are warranted. I’ve had multiple flights with a 24 hour duty day, logging almost 16 hours in that 24 hours, so I definitely needed the 12 hours prior to. Plus, controlling agencies (TACC, AOC, etc) like to push the boundaries and short you crew rest, not a few minutes but hours less than what’s mandatory.
That said, it’s also very community dependent on the interpretation. In my old community, people wouldn’t fly if they weren’t officially notified by Skeds to enter crew rest, even though that notification isn’t required per instruction. So, if a local 2.0 pattern only sortie came available, dudes still refused to fly even though that had more than 12 hours time off and plenty of crew day left.
Compare that to my current community, if a line comes available during the day, it’s up to the pilot to verify they have had sufficient crew rest and then go fly.
I have seen dudes milk it to the point of absurdity. On one flight my crew got alerted 10 minutes earlier (so 11:50 crew rest vice 12), and the AC cancelled the flight.
So, some of the criticism is warranted but the rules do actually protect the pilot pretty well.