But without that conversation, Nux's betrayal of Joe and his sacrifice would've made no sense. I really don't think the two situations can be compared.
Sure they can be compared; one's a relatively slower scene that exists to develop a character, and that's what I'm suggesting the film should've done a bit more of early on, to more firmly establish dynamics between characters and ground us in the current situation they're in better, so when that status quo gets shattered, it's more impactful.
To compare it to, say,
Speed, that's also a "non-stop" Action movie that drops us immediately into an intense situation, without taking time to build its characters or their relationships to each other up much early on (or at any point afterward, for that matter), but that approach 100% works for it because that's an entirely situation-driven movie, not a character-driven one; Keanu's character didn't know Sandra Bullock's beforehand, Dennis Hopper isn't targeting them as revenge for some wrong they committed against him in the past, and the only major characters who had a pre-existing relationship are Keanu and Jeff Daniels, and all we need to know about them is that they're partners as cops, which the film doesn't need to significantly slow down to explain to us.
Fury Road, however, is a movie where the situation is driven specifically
by the characters and their existing relationships to one another, so skipping on sufficient context for that is just a mistake, as far as I'm concerned; obviously not a movie-destroying mistake, mind you, but still one nonetheless.