The very fact that you believe that anger leads to verbal and physical fights proves OP’s point. When anger can be let out without the culture at large thinking of it as a threat that needs to be neutralized, and instead a charge that needs to be addressed, anger isn’t harmful, it’s constructive and instrumental.
Anger normally points out a boundary that’s being breached in which valuable things to a self - like autonomy, comfort, connection - are compromised. That we have so many angry people and that our culture encourages anger management rather than anger processing points to its rejection writ large
And maybe it does lead to fights when it's let out but little and contextually appropriate fights, and then the people dig deeper and gain a better understanding of their situations.
Anger can tell people that we want them to stop doing an activity and sometimes people don't even know their behavior is breaching those boundaries. One time an ex visited me in a park. I juggled the soccer ball then kicked it to her. She rolled it back and said she didn't want to play. I juggled it for 15 more minutes and then kicked it to her again. She stood up and kicked it with me for like 5 minutes.
Three weeks later, she got angry and said "And you don't respect my boundaries!" And I was really confused. She said, "I TOLD you I didn't want to kick the ball and you still kicked it to me."
I wished she had expressed more anger when I kicked it the second time. I wasn't trying to make her angry. Kicking the ball with her wasn't that important to me. I just didn't know that it bothered her that much and if I did, I immediately would have stopped.
Exactly that, "keep people in connection." I love how you framed it. When we suppress the conflict, we distance more and more from each other and from ourselves, disconnecting more and more.
Anger normally points out a boundary that’s being breached in which valuable things to a self - like autonomy, comfort, connection - are compromised. That we have so many angry people and that our culture encourages anger management rather than anger processing points to its rejection writ large