Food, especially fresh food, used to be a lot more expensive when adjusting for inflation. A canned chicken like this doesn’t look super appetizing right out of the can, but it probably tasted OK after you shredded it and put it in a casserole. And it was significantly cheaper than buying a fresh whole roasted chicken, assuming you lived somewhere that fresh whole roasted chickens were even readily available. Food like this became particularly popular during the great depression, and stuck around for decades afterwards.
Nowadays, between industrialized farming, highly optimized supply chains, and a buttload of government subsidy, fresh food is comparatively cheap. You can get a whole roasted chicken right off the spit for $5-10 at just about any grocery store. So for most people the value proposition of a $3 canned chicken isn’t really there anymore, especially if you don’t have an enormous baby-boom-era sized family to feed.
But it is possible to recover, and many do. There is no recovery from being murdered. Personally, I’m glad I’m still alive even if I’m still dealing with my own SA-induced trauma 20 years later.
Murder also has further externalities. When you kill someone, you take them away from their friends and families, who now have to live forever without that person in their lives.
But this whole conversation feels a lot like we’re asking “who was worse, Hitler or Genghis Khan?”, and it’s weird to put either side on the defensive even if there is an objectively true answer to be found.