Up 1, opponent has no TOs, I think this is the exact right play. With four seconds left it doesn't really matter if you're winning by 1 or 2, and you're right the time to gather and outlet is going to kill a lot of the clock by the time the receiver gets the pass. You might have a shot if your rebounder is an excellent outlet passer, but still drawing pretty thin unless you have Kevin Love throwing an outlet to Steph Curry, to shoot an off-balance 35 footer. Even then it's still pretty thin.
Up 2, at that point I think I try and make it. If it does go in, and I'm up 3, then I foul the opponent intentionally and make them shoot FT's. As hard as it is for a team to rebound, outlet, shoot in four seconds, if you're up 2 they're doing it for the win. If you're up 3, you foul, and then they have to make a FT, brick the second one on purpose, o-reb and score in a very limited amount of time for the tie.
It's a really narrow set of circumstances where you'd intentionally miss a FT with the lead and have it make sense. Don't think I've ever seen it before, although I have seen situations where I've realized that a team up 3 shooting its last FT with ~5 seconds left had the win/win situation of either salting the game away by going up 4, or by missing and, again, not leaving the opposing team time enough to get a shot off.