Except a developer can do exactly what you suggest with QTEs. They can program for the player to learn certain thyming, rythm, space and distance as you put it.
The use of the technique doesn't necessarily suggest lazyness, however is indeed true that it can be implemented in such fashion. Again take RE4 as example, the last thing you can say about that game is that is a "lazy" effort, however the use of QTEs brought a number of advantages and solved some important problems.
The RE4 ones are ok as they have more the nature of a mechanic to them, shoot an enemy in the leg, get close and qte. The stone rolling down the hill is dumb though, every qte involving a trap or where you have to act quick but was never presented such a situation before is mostly a matter of 2 or more retries as you fail the first attempt.
Bayonettas qtes are dumb, but at least they don't change the buttons for the same qtes and the game is build for replayability and you learn the qtes pretty quick.
When qtes are used in such a fashion they resemble more standard mechanics, in a game where you are constantly surprised by new things/events/traps etc and they use all their own qtes with their own button layout this never works the first time around and you die because you weren't ready for it.
God of War 3 was okay because they put button prompts on the edges of the screen, so you didn't need to know which button to press, it was only left or right or up or down. This is the only game where you can succeed on the first try.
Then a lot of game devs make their qtes extremely easy to solve because they are aware that failing them leads to frustration and by doing so they take away all weight and meaning of player agency. It becomes a cutscene where you press a button to keep it going, especially in long-drawn out scenes this feels very wrong to me and I wish they would have gone for a non interactive cutscene instead so I could enjoy the crazy action that isn't really compatible with the rest of the games mechanics and be on the edge when it really matters, in the "normal" gameplay sections.
Lazyness may be the wrong term, it could also be helplessness and inability on the devs side.