The inconsistency is very annoying and the fact that the call on the pitch matters so much is also annoying. They should just go with what the correct call would be regardless of what the ref gave on the pitch.
I mean, if Pogba hadn’t been given a pen against Villa I don’t think it’d have been overturned due to the clear and obvious clause. But in the same game, we have a player nowhere near the ball, flying in elbow first towards Pogba’s head, and the VAR doesn’t even bother to check it even if play is stopped for three minutes while the medical team attends to Pogba‘s bleeding face. If there was a willingness to favour United by referees then they had a perfectly good opportunity to give a clear penalty for an assault inside the box, yet they chose not to. Instead of talking about protecting players against assault, the entire discussion revolves around the amount of penalties United have received with no mention of the legitimacy of said penalties. It’s as if people are under the impression that there’s a finite amount of times teams can break the laws of the game against a certain team in a certain area of the pitch, yet United have passed that line and the referees just keep giving them penalties anyway.