As someone who has never drank and often has discussions with people about alcohol, it's amusing to see how many people go straight to defending their choice to drink alcohol in this thread.
I don’t drink too much, but when I’m extremely stressed out (e.g. when enraged, extremely scared, in shock, etc. to the point of being unable to use higher brain function, being ready to fight or flee, etc.), one drink goes incredibly far toward taking the edge off, reducing both mental and physical symptoms of anxiety, and bringing out calm, rational thinking.
Alcohol also helps a lot of people with social awkwardness/fears, which is why so many social meeting places (especially places where strangers meet) serve alcohol. It serves a real useful function there, helping people to be more trusting and open.
Obviously when people drink more than they can handle, it also can have severe negative side effects, and can cause people to have emotional breakdowns, lose their inhibitions to the point of idiocy, lose their basic coordination, suffer memory loss, etc. But the same is true for many medicines/foods/drugs.
Many problematic uses of alcohol are related to people’s other severe emotional problems (post-traumatic stress, ongoing abuse at home or work, working through the death of someone close or a bad breakup, extreme loneliness, depression, etc.). If self-medicating with large doses of alcohol was not an option, it’s not clear what alternatives they would turn to or whether those would be preferable. The real lesson IMO is that we need much better social support and mental healthcare in this country.
As long as the risks of x are acknowledged, people can make their own choice as to whether they confer enough benefit from x to accept the y level of risk.
It'd be dishonest to pretend that alcohol doesn't have any benefits (social or otherwise). After all, it's been used for millennia. We can argue about whether those benefits outweigh the risks, especially as we learn more about what the risks are (i.e. like we did with tobacco). But I don't think it's particularly surprising or amusing. I'm sure you could name an activity in your life that has some amount of risk that you still choose to partake in because you gain benefit from it (and perhaps be inclined to comment on a story about it too - but I could be wrong).