The Slice is Right

[Myon88]

Once you reach 4 pillars, the safe zones become very small and are often only on one side of the arena. If you happen to choose the wrong side to stand on BEFORE the pillars rise and the telegraphs go out, it is possible to have too little time to find and reach the safe zone, at which point you're just done

You're right about that. When 4 pillars are active, two adjacent pillars being circle aoes will completely cover the side of the arena they're on, all the way to the edge leaving no safe room (this doesn't happen with 3 pillars, because they're spaced further apart).

However, this still isn't an impossible situation. The question then becomes, why do you feel the need to 'choose a side' so early in the first place? Now yeah, I can see why it would make sense in general - it gives a better field of view, the pillars kinda make you want to be far from them, and it works fine for the early phases. However, if you wanted to ensure this never happened when 4 pillars are active, there is another solution that is 100% guaranteed to work.

Instead of picking a side so early, stand in the middle of the map as the pillars spawn. If you see from the cut animation that your 'side' is going to be completely covered by two circle aoes, instead of running back there, just go to any of the other 3 sides instead. Since you're starting from the middle now, all sides are equally close and you will definitely get to the safe one in time - as long as you can identify it quickly enough.