Well side winds can also cause the nose of the aircraft not being aligned with the runway during approach, then the tricky part is to still get all the wheels and the horizontal velocity vector inline right at the moment the aircraft hits the runway. That's something airline pilots do routinely.
I'd say side-slipping a bit is good for fine adjustments, but in the case of Flight 236, they were willingly way to high and fast (had too much energy), because when you're flying a big glider full of passengers aiming at a small island, not having enough energy is very likely to be catastrophic. That's a scenario where blowing the tires is much better than crashing on the sea shore, being (a bit) too fast was a safeguard in that case, because that "energy surplus" was everything they had in case of a wind turbulence or anything unexpected...