Sims were originally meant as a tool and a means of procedural training and checking of those procedures. It let problems, that would've been too dangerous to simulate in the real aircraft, to occur and have crews in real time trained to deal with them. If you blew the sim in the old days you had a final check of the same exercise in the aeroplane (at your own expense or not). In other words the aircraft had priority of skill checking over the damn box.
The level of sim tech has risen to the degree where almost all emergency and abnormal procedures can be covered. I have been emphasising PROCEDURES, not real life - no sim I have been in reproduces exactly how the aircraft really feels in strong x/winds, really severe turbulence, the chatter and clutter of ATC who may or may not understand English, REAL cockpit fires and smoke, etc etc, and how one gets that annoying but unavoidable "dizzy" feeling whenever one suddenly stops after heavily braking the sim during taxi or RTO.
And DEFINITELY no sim should ever be prostituted further to the point where its use permits full replacement of actual hands-on time for endorsement and/or LT purposes.