Not only is it realistic it was studied heavily, we could launch from 15K AGL and land within about 10 meters regardless of wind. Kaman corp and us gov did research including rotor deployment above mach 1. I can't find the full report but here's a paper on it.

The benefit was you could land over land and have a controlled descent and very soft touch down. It also was a single stage system so you could use it to slow from multi-mach to sub mach and then ride it all the way down to touch down with 1 system.

The downside is you have 1 chance to deploy it and it has a slight mass and volume penalty over parachutes. They also can lead to gyroscopic precision as the frictional and inertia of the blades spinning up want to make the parent craft spin too. In the end parachutes were very robust and easy to engineer where the rotochute would have required millions and years of development so it was skipped for Apollo.

if I dig around I may stil have some videos of the systems we built. It was miraculous to see as it goes straighter than a parachute and slower and is just not affected by the wind as the blade tip speed relative to variations in wind speed is miniscule and it would reject off axis wind much much better. We abandoned it only because it would have taken about 3-4mill more to make the concept work and we didn't have the budget to do it, also there was some argument that it doesn't scale well with vehicle mass, you get into 1ton and above and suddenly you need gyrcopter sized blades and deploying those without issue is a real challenge or you need something also complex and unproven like telescoping or inflatable blades.