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This is not so rare in my experience. It is why I am heavily anti-bullying. Childhood and adolescence is when you build intuition of how the world works. If you drop something, it falls. Hit a hard object and you get hurt. You won't fly no matter how hard you flap your arms.
However, not everything is so clear cut. For social situations in particular, people tend to take whatever rules applied to the people they spend time with growing up and assume they hold true for the wider population. This is why childhood bullying is so insidious. Whatever way you find to cope will naturally stick with you well into adulthood. If you assume you deserve it, then you will believe yourself lesser than everybody else and become an easy victim. If you assume people around you are assholes, you become a misanthrope. Assume that they were good people misguided by human nature, and you start forming strong opinions about group dynamics and overruling instinct through rational thought. Maybe you view any kind of discrimination as evil, or any kind of ingroup bias as bad.
It is not a given that this will happen of course, but I have met a decent amount of adults who never "got over it". These ideas are often self-reinforcing, and people take them for granted to the point that they never even think to challenge them, because they feel as natural as gravity itself.
Yes, that's the purpose of bullying: to socialize the bullied into their lesser role.
Most bullies really don't think that far ahead, and the "lesser role" often turns out to limit the potential of the bullied significantly. So the victim loses out on quality of life while society at large lose out on that person's abilities. The only winners are the bullies who get to have fun and/or temporarily cement their social status.
As ArjinFerman points out, the bullies don't need to think about it; they're operating according to their nature. Society is hierarchical, and no one wants to be in the lower levels, but someone has to be for it to work. Bullying is one way human nature accomplishes that.
This is why authority is so upset when someone strikes back against bullies outside the rules of the playground; it is disruptive.
(The bullies are not the top either, but they're higher than their victims!)
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I'm not really for bullying, but to play devil's advocate, the former doesn't matter - how far ahead to beavers think when building a dam? - and the latter could very well be to the benefit of society - the kinds of people who came into positions of power after "anti-bullying" became a thing, did massive damage to society and our culture.
I do not see a lot of typical victims in power. In mainstream perhaps, there are more. Those who get in power are, as the other guy noted, still the bully type, even if not the locker-showing jock type.
If you're thinking of the modal trans activist moderator, he wouldn't be bullied into insignificance, he'd just adapt to grow up into a duckspeak comissar of some other ideology.
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These people are the bullies though. They simply found a way to weaponize the rules against people who they dislike. Physical violence is banned but social violence is not, so there is no way to defend yourself against social ostracism, rumors, or even violence from people who are overlooked by enforcement or simply don't care about consequences. The reason why SJW's ring alarm bells in the minds of past bullying victims is that their tactics give Vietnam flashbacks to their experiences in highschool.
Consider how much more resilient to criticism Scott Alexander might have been had he not been bullied. He might have never banned the culture war thread from his forum, as he would have been able to dismiss the outrage. He would probably write even better articles if he was not terrified of backlash.
And Scott is doing fairly well. Many who struggled with bullying are unable to work well alongside others or attain stable relationships. Hurting themselves and people who they could have gotten along with and helped in a different life.
Again, obviously not everyone reacts to bullying like this. The effect it has seems to depend less on the actions of the bullies and more on the conclusions that the victim forms about the world. Some don't develop counterproductive coping mechanisms at all, and simply end up learning how to deal with adversity instead. But as far as I can tell, the people who take away positive lessons are much rarer than the people who do not.
So bullies have limited control over exactly how their victims will react (Violence? Avoidance? Come out stronger?), and have no real way of discerning whether the person deserves the treatment or if society is better off with them being punished. Ultimately, the only people who benefit are the bullies themselves. Any downstream effects are unpredictable, but mostly negative for society at large.
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