yeah i see the argument, and its an important skillset to be able to deal with chaos/bullies but this other part of me wonders whether dealing with bullying early on is healthy at all?
to be clear, i do believe that tough personalities that aren't straight up bullying can still happen inside of a group homeschooled environment.
Plenty? I've almost never seen it. I had a few teachers drop occasional insults toward me but they would never dare do anything to me like a kid would. They can't even spank students anymore. Almost every issue that a kid has with a teacher is caused by bad behavior. Of course I haven't been in grade school in decades and I went to probably a nice school in the scheme of things. I have seen quite a few stories of teachers doing awful things to their students, for example harassing them about politics. But I really think these cases are rare, and most likely kinds of teacher harassment are easily avoided by students.
Bullying seems to be a phenomenon almost exclusive to children. Adults don't mess with each other as much for various reasons, not least of which is that adults have more options to deal with the problem.
I think the way to handle socializing kids if you homeschool is to enroll them in extracurricular activities where they can meet all kinds of people. If the activity is a good one, you'll still probably avoid the worst types that appear in public schools, and give the kids more exposure to different kinds of people. And if it doesn't work for some reason, you can switch activities or groups more easily than you could ever switch schools.