Hey!
My original plan was to make Michael pull you out by default, but I liked the idea of giving the player something of a chance (albeit very small) to escape on their own.
It is intentionally very difficult, even for me (I have about an 80% success rate), so instead of a penalty, failing the mini-game resulted in my original idea for the scene.
I plan on increasing the safe zone for the popups to make it less difficult for people who actually wanna retry till they get it right, which is surprisingly a lot of people.