Just because one has watched a lot of soccer doesn't mean that one is automatically exempt from the charge of trying to Americanize parts of the sport that work perfectly well for the rest of the world. One of the hidden delights of the current timekeeping system is that a team conceding a late goal can always rush back for the kickoff thinking that it may have a chance to respond, because you can never quite be sure how much time is actually left on the clock. Maybe the referee will blow for full time directly after the kickoff, or maybe you've got two minutes to equalize; what you'll never see is that Duke-Yale scenario outlined above, where one team knows it's physically impossible to score from the kickoff and the restart does feel pointless.
I do like the backpass rule and think it makes the game better. But sometimes I do wonder if there's a relationship between attempts to keep the ball in play for a greater proportion of matches and the amount of squad rotation we see in the modern game. I'm sure that as players have gotten stronger and fitter and push themselves closer to the limit more and more, most of this would have happened naturally, in much the same way that MLB starting pitchers just don't throw complete games any more. But the old backpass song-and-dance sort of served as a series of mini-timeouts, allowing players to catch their breath and push themselves for longer because that much more of the 90 minutes didn't involve having to run around the pitch. And as soon as you need a deep squad of rotatable players to compete for trophies, it becomes that much easier for mega-clubs to distance themselves from the Nottingham Forests and Ipswich Towns who used to be able to give the Liverpools and Manchester Uniteds all they could handle over the course of a season.
By the way, if you're not familiar with Brazil vs. Sweden at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, you should check out this video:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/football/44500178
The Welsh referee Clive Thomas blew for full time while the ball was in the air from a Brazilian corner which was subsequently headed into the net for what would have been the winning goal. Thomas, in being so fastidious with his timekeeping, broke the unwritten rule of letting the final attack always play out before blowing your whistle, and he was roundly mocked for doing so. Sometimes, sport works better when you just let it happen.
