In the USAF I’ve fired hundreds of WP rockets at various targets, some real, most not. I’ve also been out on the ground and seen the occasional WP casualty, mostly animal.
Somebody who gets a direct hit with WP gets burnt. So do their cloths, fur, and the surrounding bushes. Get burnt enough & you/it die. BFD.
The idea that WP is somehow an evil or chemical weapon on a par with mustard gas is nuts. Fire is fire, explosions are explosions, and wounds are wounds.
When any weapon does its thing, there’s a region right close by that gets utterly destroyed. For a pistol bullet that region mught be 3/4" in diameter whereas for a big nuke it might be 2 miles. And there’s a much larger region that’s utterly unaffected, say everthing 2+ feet away for the bullet & 25+ miles away (upwind) for the nuke.
All the horror lies in the intermediate range, particularly near the outer limits of the effects. That’s where you get ugly wounds, and the random hit or miss nature. Shrapnel is partly so terrifying because after the blast you’re fine, the guy next to you is dead, and the guy next to him is missing most of an arm. Why me? Why him? Anything that random is unnerving.
Non-fatal WP wounds are ugly,somewhat uglier than mechanically equivalent metal-caused wounds. OTOH, because WP warheads are less powerful than corresponding HE weapons, the wounding perimeter of the blast effect zone is much smaller. Dumping a WP round in a crowd is gonna be ugly, but dropping the same size HE anti-personel round in the same spot is gonna kill more folks and wound more folks, some pretty greivously.
If forced to chose between being X feet away from a WP hit or an HE hit of the same size shell/rocket, I’d chose WP every time. Most times that’d be a winning decision.
WP isn’t a toy or a non-lethal like tear gas or stage smoke, but it isn’t Sarin either. The sensational breathless editorializing: “kills people, leaves clothes!!” is somebody inventing “facts” to push an agenda.