I’d say that the lightwhip was one of the weirdest and most impractical lightsaber designs that ever existed in any canon (if it even counts).
I could see something like that making more sense if it behaved somewhat different physically from a lightsaber, ie, a plasma-whip which deals immense damage but doesn’t cut through metal like butter.
Didn’t Lumiya’s lightwhip from the 80’s Marvel comics kinda work like that?
Pretty much. It wasn’t even a pure lightwhip; it had metal cords with energy ribbons generated around them.