Half way there. They need to have BOTH sides strike for the ball, otherwise the opposing team have an 8-7 shoving advantage
The shoving advantage is realistically all that they have to make it a fair contest, with the ball being fed in straight but at a full shoulderwidth difference between the sides.
My own shoulder-to-shoulder distance is about 46 cm, and I played most of my rugby at hooker (grassroots, but 500 games and an average of 5 against the head per game).
If the law is to allow the shoulder interpretation rather than the "one piece of the ball" interpretation - ball "length in line" 280-300 mm as per 2.2 - then the differential is still at least a foot (of the 12 inch kind) just in terms of being able to touch the ball.
Let us be honest, this is about making the scrum restart less ludicrous than it has been, even since before "the hit". It forces Australia to play a competent front row (although they have already improved that aspect of their game since their lowest point).
Last but not least, a competent hooker lifts his foot for less than a second when he taps. I haven't done any timings, but if the opponents are not allowed to push before the ball is in, then the tap is at t=0, the ball starts to be put in at t=0.25, lands around t=0.5 and is hooked less than 0.1 seconds later, and the foot is back in position to drive at t=1.0.
We used to have four calls, simply the names of the front row and the scrum half, back in the times when shoulders were allowed to go lower than they are now, for opposition ball, and although most of my front row's 2500 balls against the head (we probably gave away 250) were by my agility when I had it, the next most was from the "non-call" of 8-man push. The other calls were TH hook (never used early!) and LH ball (both Hooker and TH going low), in addition to the more speculative SH ball which was typically used only on their defending 5m and was a deliberate kick through (which I believed to be illegal at the time, I must admit).
I didn't keep a record of exactly how many games I played, and I was a crappy TH towards the end, but I've played in all three front row positions for about 100 games each, although perhaps less than 8000 minutes at TH, between 1984 and 2008. Just to be clear: 8000 minutes in a single position may sound like a lot, but 800 games in the front row only works out at a bit over 1000 hours, which is probably less than my late father spent on the golf course in the last three years of his life when he was already in his eighties. It is, however, also rather longer than the 40 minutes he played as a flanker once.
My point is that this compromise may well work, and deliver a fair contest as well as continuity of play in addition to player safety.