Chuck Yeager emphatically was a selfish asshole, but...
> There are many incidents that prove this wrong.
No, there aren't, and your saying so is just a failure in logic. Literally every instance of a crash would have to play out the way you insist it should, with a pilot taking into account the presence of population centers before ejecting, in order to "prove this wrong."
The tag team duo of MiG pilots who crashed in Michigan a couple of weeks ago didn't even agree on whether it was time to eject. They certainly hadn't placed the plane on some kind of safe trajectory (it landed literally right next to an apartment building). For that matter, maybe that incident is somehow an argument for selfishness: if they hadn't punched out right when they did, they would have been outside the envelope for a safe ejection, and that would be two dead people for sure.
All that said, I don't think you and I would disagree on how pilots should handle the situation. I just don't think it plays out as well as we'd like every time.
So you posit that the ejection seat adds some selfishness to the pilots? Because I’m not kidding there are a lot of incidents where we have inflight recordings of pilots without ejection seats steering away from populated areas in their last action, as well as the incident where an Israeli pilot with an ejection seat choose not to eject (and died) moving his plane off line.
Then, I’ll just tell you in my personal experience in the airplane, I’ve seen 2 pilots risk their lives moving away from a town and not die (luckily) but crash and destroy their airframe. The other pilots I flew with, I’d say 95 out of 100 would do the same.
There are many incidents that prove this wrong. The comment above yours is one example.