The fact that you survived a bad incident does not make it good. What you described is reminiscent of the argument that school bullying is just "boys being boys," when research shows that it is a seriously damaging experience that has lifetime consequences, and I don't even mean in the cases of the people who commit suicide as a result.
As an educational theorist who has done countless presentations to teachers in an attempt to show what research says are the most effective methods of instruction, I assure you that the most common hostile encounter from the entrenched old guard features the "it worked for me" argument.
I used to use this story to describe the problem with that thinking. In the Civil War, perhaps the single most disastrous example of poor strategy was Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, in which General Lee ordered Pickett to send his forces in a slow charge across a wide, open field into enemy fire. They suffered 60% casualties and accomplished nothing, as I recall. It was a classic example of outmoded strategy meeting new weaponry, but it was many, many years before the futility of this strategy was finally realized and removed from military instruction.
I asked people to imagine one of the survivors of that charge staying in the military and eventually teaching military strategy at an academy. One day he teaches his students the strategy of sending an entire army across a wide, open field while an entrenched enemy mows them down. In a staff meeting, another staff member questions the value of teaching this, and the instructor says, "It worked for me."
The phrase, "it worked for me" often means "I survived it," and it does not recognize that many others did not.
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