I am really great you did not "give in", since right now (following the rejection you posted about) you would have been even more hurt than you already are had you "given in". So, you had the right intuition not to "give in" - you essentially protected yourself well.

More generally - people differ so widely when they respond to you on this thread because the main tool one uses to settle such issues and concerns is intuition, and intuition is notoriously hard to quantify, analyze, describe, mold into policy statements, etc.

But you had it - to the extent that you protected yourself so well, you had the right intuition and can congratulate yourself on having the right intuition.