What if I had these two sentences? Do they both mean that she definitely is not rich?
She looks as if she is rich.
She looks as if she was rich.
If I understand you correctly, these two are interchangeable and mean essentially the same thing and there's no need for distancing.
We have a further complicator there,
looks = appears. This itself suggests that things may not be what they seem to be
. The first suggests to me that her appearance gives the impression that she
is rich; the second that her appearance gives the impression that she
was rich.
I remember a thread on this not long after I joined the forum. By the end of it, I was unsure what meant what. I think that this is one of those areas where the two parties in a conversation know, with the help of context, what is meant, and grammarians analyse it at their peril. In formal writing, I would think very carefully about how I composed my sentence.