Starting at high RPM is good for the engine
High RPM, cold unlubricated start sounds like trouble to me.
I have no problem driving an electric car.
But range, re-energize times, price are deal killers.
I'm not a specialist on engines, but here is what I believe to know. The RPM as such is not a problem for the engine as long as the oil pressure is present. But if you use the classical starter, it's too slow and the oil pressure hasn't built up yet. A classical engine starts without oil, but a hybrid's ICE starts at full oil pressure.
When you start a standard car the starter motor cannot spin the engine even to the idling speed; it can't spin it more than 10% of that speed. This means that you have very few ignitions per second - and accordingly low power output. That power output is supposed to accelerate the engine to the idle speed. This is hard to do if the engine is cold - or if it is very cold, as in winter. Starting at faster RPM gives you more power right off the bat.
Another reason is that as the classical engine is started it self-accelerates. There is no control over the process; it is unstable and it is self-governing. This results in an aggressive spin-up while the oil pressure (that is produced by the same engine) is still low. This is not helping. In a hybrid like Prius the engine speed is ramped up by the M/G, under control. Then the ignition is enabled and the engine starts running on its own... at the same speed! There are no jolts or anything. But that's not all. The car starts drawing power from the engine - and that is done at the same speed that the engine is currently operating. This is possible because of this complex electric CVT. As result the engine is started smoothly. This makes engine's life much easier.
There are other advantages. For example, a classical car has a moving gear that connects the starter engine. This engagement takes time, and when your battery gets low it starts failing first. A hybrid engine has a permanent connection to its "starter," and that motor is powerful enough to start anything in any weather, backed by the main traction battery.
By the way, Prius could start the engine at any speed, all the way down to zero RPM if that would be of any advantage. (They could even spin it backwards; that's a side effect of the reverse "gear.") But Toyota engineers picked the starting speed that is very close to the idle speed. I'm sure they know a bit more about cars than we both combined :-)
Or, for example, consider the electrical issues. The classical starter motor, however weak in comparison to the ICE, still presents a massive electrical load. When you start the car all lights dim. The battery is connected with thick cables, but that's not enough. There are resistances that you cannot remove (such as the internal resistance of the battery, which increases as the battery ages.) The 12V battery is an obsolete starting technology; it's with us only because it is legacy. No electrical engineer today would do it this way - a low voltage battery, thick copper cables, hundreds of amperes of current, a primitive DC brushed motor - you must be kidding. We have technology today to do whatever we want with our electric machines; a simplistic series machine is more than a century old, and it is not used pretty much anywhere else for many reasons (reason #1: contacts are bad for you.) Your computer has fans that use far more advanced motors, for example (they have electronic controllers, and integrated tachometers, they have no brushes and they are EMI-clean.)
As you can see, a gas-electric hybrid is nothing but a seriously improved classical car. However you can always go too far and invent a pure EV; that does not work yet because our technology hasn't progressed past burning of hydrocarbons. It's very hard to invent something that is as efficient as gasoline. A molecule of gasoline contains a lot of energy; no battery can match it so far. Probably a chemical battery cannot even exist that comes close; I'm not a chemist, but there are certain laws of nature that define how much energy you can store in a molecule. In my personal opinion we need to go past chemistry directly to nuclear physics to get an energy source that is comparable to a tank of gas. This is why I'm so skeptical about modern EVs (but not hybrids.) In my opinion, if a car costs far more than the average it must present very good reasons why the customer should go out and buy it. The more the cost difference is, the better arguments should the car have. Hybrids like Prius and Honda Insight and a few other are kind of there. Plenty of people buy them, even though Obama never sat in a Prius. However few people buy Volt and Leaf because for their sky-high prices those cars should fly. But they don't. They are less useful than a plain vanilla, beaten up, $2K Honda Accord because they can leave you stranded. That's the worst offense that any car can commit. Well, Volt will not leave you stranded because the car carries its own gas-driven generator :-) An EV and a little trailer to charge it :-)