The alternative is worse. Imagine it harmed people in Ramat Gan. The response would've been "It didn't harm people in Bene Beraq because of our learning!"

I think a more accurate way to understand the sentiment is that it is a miracle that more people weren’t hurt. The eiruv string remaining intact is understood (rightly or wrongly) to be a sign from HaShem that this was in the zechus of shabbos.

In fairness, people do this all the time, and Jews perhaps most notably so: They'll talk about the "miracle" of someone, say, surviving the Holocaust, glossing over the fact that six million people didn't merit such a miracle for some reason. (Or to be more accurate, often merited one miracle after another until they didn't.)

Which is fine if you're going to make a seudat hodaya for your family or something. Writing books about "miracles of the Holocaust," or giving "inspirational" speeches about the guy who missed 9/11 because he was saying Selichot, or claiming that religious kibbutzim were spared on October 7th, is really out of line.

(I recently heard a representative of one of those religious kibbutzim talk about their experiences, and he claimed no such thing. He was in fact deeply mourning the foreign workers who were killed on his kibbutz, and the people shot outside their gates, and the soldiers killed defending them.)

But getting carried away over a string really, really, takes it to a bizarre level.

My father, a"h, used to hate all the "miraculous survivor stories". For every one of those were 1000 people who were just ashes.
When Alex Bornstein (Marvelous Maisel) gave her famous awards speech about how her mother stepped out of line when the Nazis were about to shoot her and survived, I just shook my head. Yes, her mother survived but 1000 other women trying it would've been shot. She just didn't get it.