So… I’ve encountered this concept before but haven’t thought about it much. It’s worth thinking about some more.
If you think about the specific niche of fighting games, rollback networking could work to some degree. Often, you’ll have players of different skill levels. The game can notice this and ‘predict’ that the other player will block/hit because he’s been hitting more and better so far. But this is also kinda shitty: weaker players are going to do worse, because the algorithm already predicted for them that they’ll do badly.
Furthermore, fighting games are frenetic, and there’s very little time to process information. Contesting a move, or really noticing that something fishy happened, is really hard. Also, ‘undoing’ a block that didn’t happen isn’t a huge deal most of the time – most of the time, it just means restoring a little chunk on the HP bar. Same thing for undoing a missing combo hit in a series – in this case, it’s easier to just pretend the hit did happen, and keep on going. The attacker will be pleased that he was able to get the combo right, and the defender won’t know the difference.
In other words, the game is essentially designed around hiding missing and incorrect information. Whether you can do that in other games remains to be seen, but certainly in single player games you can always err on the side of the player – assume the player made the correct move, and he’s unlikely to mind. It’s only in games with large possibility spaces (for example, you could move in one of many directions and end up in an entirely different place) where this won’t work well.