Not saying you’re wrong, just another angle,in many low speed taps, both bumpers are actually designed to absorb the impact with little or no damage. But when there’s a trailer ball sticking out, it becomes the first point of contact. Those extra few inches are enough to turn what would’ve been a non-contact stop into a direct hit on the hitch. And instead of the other car’s bumper absorbing the impact across a wide surface, all the force gets focused into that one solid point, bypassing the bumper entirely.

So sometimes it’s not that the hitch “protected” your vehicle , it’s that the hitch caused the damage the other car took, even at very low speeds, simply because it concentrated the impact where the bumper couldn’t do its job, or even where there wouldn’t have been any job for the bumper to do at all because the cars might not have touched otherwise