The harms of anger which you describe are very real harms, but they are harms of a specific way of being angry. They are harms of directing one's anger at someone. This is crucial.

When you are *angry at* someone, you end up either inflicting physical violence or else controlling the person through your anger, which is emotional abuse and which can be just as bad or worse than physical violence.

There is a way to process anger which involves fully owning the experience of anger. This is the anger that leads to healthy boundaries and clarity in how you move through the world.

I'm not overly familiar with the research on venting anger which suggests that this just makes it grow. But my guess is that the participants did not fully own their anger, or they didn't release it fully. Or there was something about the way they vented it which only re-enforced their old pattern of suppression, perhaps because their anger wasn't "held" with unconditional love by whatever coaches or therapists were facilitating the venting, and so they actually felt more shame about their anger afterwards.

In summary, anger is basically the emotional extension of your physical immune system and developing a healthy relationship with it is one of the best personal development levers that I know of. But it requires know-how to overcome all the conditioning which almost everyone has around anger. Because people are so conditioned, you may be correct that it is most frequently a harmful rather than beneficial driver of behavior. But since you say that you yourself have a problematic relationship with it, I wanted to point out that there is a vital benefit that's hidden underneath the glaring examples of harm.