Does a rest remove ALL chase-induced exhaustion or just ONE level?

Question

Most exhaustion can be removed by a long rest, food, and drink (PHB 251)

Finishing a long rest reduces a creature's exhaustion level by 1, provided that creature has also ingested some food and drink.

Exhaustion caused by dashing while in a chase, however, is removed by a short OR long rest, with nothing else required. (DMG 252)

A creature can remove the levels of exhaustion it gained during the chase by finishing a short or long rest.

I understand that a short rest alone can remove chase exhaustion.

What I don't understand is whether one rest removes multiple levels of exhaustion or just one. That is, is the second quote above more explicitly written as:

1. A creature can remove ALL the LEVELS of exhaustion it gained during the chase by finishing a SINGLE short or long rest.

(or)

2. A creature can remove ONE of the LEVELS of exhaustion it gained during the chase for EACH short or long rest that it finishes.

Answer 1

One rest will remove all the exhaustion levels you gained from the chase.

A creature can remove the levels of exhaustion it gained during the chase by finishing a short or long rest.

Emphasis mine. "the levels" are plural, but "a short or long rest" is singular. So the one rest applies to all the exhaustion levels.

If it had said something like 'you can remove the levels of exhaustion by finishing rests', that would have indicated that it takes more than one, but not how many total or per rest.

Answer 2

I think the best argument for a short rest removing all exhaustion levels caused by a chase (RAW in DMG p.252) is that, in ten rounds of a chase, you can easily accumulate three or more levels of exhaustion. Ten rounds only equals one minute in-game. It would be unreasonable to assume that running for a single minute requires multiple days of rest to recover from.

That is why "chase exhaustion" can be recovered the same day, in one hour. You're an adventurer, sprinting should only temporarily impede you. Levels of exhaustion gained in other ways require a long rest, and this makes sense. For example, you could gain a level of exhaustion for going longer than 24 hours since your last long rest. How to make up for that exhaustion? You take a long rest. You could feasibly forego rest for 48 hours, and therefore require two long rests to fully recover. That all makes much more sense to me than needing two long rests (at least 16 hours) after sprinting for one minute.