Struggling to understand why Savage Worlds is so, er, savage

I recently started running a campaign in Savage Worlds, and overall, I really, really like it - it feels filled with really smart design decisions. But the fact that it's so well designed in general makes me all the more confused about why it's so lethal, because it really seems out of place with the rest of the system.

By "lethal", I mean specifically the fact that any roll from any enemy has a chance to instantly incapacitate or kill a character. And to be clear, I know this is something people bring up a lot, and I've read some of the justifications for it - but nothing I've seen has really addressed what bothers me about it. To me, the system's lethality has two major problems:

1) It doesn't fit the pulpy, good-guys-vs-bad-guys tone Savage Worlds is going for. When I think of pulpy adventure stories, I think of heroes with plot armor a mile thick - they can get shot at by legions of henchmen, fall off cliffs, get blown up, you name it - but somehow they always manage to escape by the skin of their teeth and nab the bad guy. They definitely are not constantly getting knocked out, or permanently injured, or even killed by random mooks who get one good hit in.

2) It strongly discourages players from engaging in any combat or using Bennies for anything other than Soak rolls. Thinking about it from a player perspective, if there's a nonzero chance that any attack on my character can result in them getting instantly killed or incapacitated, I'm going to try to avoid combat as much as possible, and reserve all my Bennies for Soak rolls. Again, this seems totally at odds with how Savage Worlds is designed and how it encourages you to play - combat is a pretty significant aspect of the rules and you're encouraged to have frequent combat involving lots of Extras. And you also want your players to be using Bennies for fun, interesting stuff rather than just "not dying".

And to be clear, I'm not against lethal systems in general - for instance, I've played games using Death in Space and Pirate Borg, and for those systems and settings, I think the lethality is a great fit! But with Savage Worlds, I just struggle to imagine when you would ever run a campaign using the combat rules exactly as written, and feel like it was a good fit.

I have already implemented some house rules to get rid of this lethality, so I'm not sure that I need advice, per se - I'm just really having trouble understanding the intent here and am trying to figure out if I'm missing something obvious or if other people share my confusion. And if you do run a Savage Worlds campaign using the combat rules exactly as written and feel like it works well, I'd be curious to know more details!