You flinch at a coiled shape on a path before recognising it as a garden hose. Why would evolution build a pathway that is wrong this often, when a slower one gets it right?

B. Because the two errors cost wildly different amounts.

The design looks foolish only if you weigh errors equally: a false alarm costs a wasted startle, a miss costs the organism. The architecture matches, the thalamus-to-amygdala route carries a crude signal in about 12 ms while the cortical route takes several times longer, so you flinch first and learn what it was afterwards.