One needn't necessarily be killed to suffer adversely from even a single shot; engine damage, control surface, fuel leak...lots of things can go wrong when you're getting pelted and can't control your plane to evade or return accurate fire.

And that adverse effect can happen as a result of the stutter due to no fault of the player, either in skill or action.

Nobody ever said the only adverse effect was direct and immediate death. You could suffer any number of outcomes, even indirectly, when this issue occurs.

Yeah, I probably should qualify every observation as pertaining to "my system", and "definitely" is not appropriate

I wonder if it's something chip-specific, because "on my system", hardware antialiasing looks and performs better than native game antialiasing.