Okay, seeing as I actually teach Krav Maga I might as well weight in on this.

I think a lot of this is based on the people you have met who do Krav Maga. I'm genuinely curious where you saw these guys, I'd like to check it out. It's true that Krav Maga has an overblown badass type reputation due to the way it's marketed sometimes. As a result of this you get a lot of people who attend a weekly class for a short while and brag like they're tough, the same way you see guys who join an MMA gym for a couple of months and walk around telling people they're a cage fighter. I agree, some of the marketing is fucking stupid, but that's a fault of the marketing, not the system.

We do spar. A lot. We also do pressure drills (weapon attacks, multiple attackers) with fully resistant partners, though the amount of fucked up illegal moves we do requires some pretty heavy padding to avoid injury. Anyone who has spent any time with an instructor who knows what they're doing will have done this.

The key thing that people take from pressure drills like this is that they a nasty, messy and a lot of the time you won't make it out safely if at all. One of the main reasons we do this is to drive home the reality that you're not superman and situations like this should be avoided at all costs. We make a point of teaching peripheral awareness, compliance as a first step and focus on how to diffuse situations with self defense as a worst case scenario. It would be irresponsible not to make a point of that. I used to do muay thai and MMA primarily, and despite the fact that I feel more safe now that I know Krav, I'm a lot less likely to get in a fight now.

There was also nothing in that knife attacks video I saw that I disagreed with, or that flies in the face of how knife defense is taught in Krav. Our knife drills look all hectic and fucked up like that most of the time. We also at no point say that the knife defense drills we teach will work 100% of the time because frankly that's fucking ridiculous. No technique works 100% of the time. But it is possible to survive a knife attack using the stuff you learn in Krav, it's happened tons of times, and provided the person who is taught it understands that it's an absolute last resort it's certainly a lot better to know it than otherwise.