Tax the rich to provide a safety net = Europe

Print money to fund government programs = Venezuela

Historically, was there ever a time that hyperinflation didn't end badly?

There are plenty of times where printing money didn't produce hyperinflation. For example, the US pursued a policy called quantitative easing over the last decade which involved dumping trillions of dollars into the coffers of banks; inflation is still sluggish. This is because there are four terms in the equation of exchange: MV=PQ. If you increase M (money), P (price) will only go up if V (the velocity of money) and Q (demand) remain constant. In the US, V was very low and there was a lot of slack in our productive capacity (mostly because construction had overbuilt during the bubble years). The result was no hyperinflation or inflation of any kind.

I never quite understood why many central banks expand the money supply by purchasing financial assets instead of just handing out money to everyone.

Really? Seems pretty obvious - purchasing assets helps their friends in Goldman and Citibank. Handing out money helps the poors. If you were a fat cat banker, what would you do? This, despite the fact that the utility of money is greater for the poors and the stimulatory effect of giving it to them is greater. But if we do that, we are told, we create "moral hazard" because people will think they don't have to pay their debts. Meanwhile we bail out TBTF banks like there is no tomorrow, moral hazard be damned.

I had vaguely thought that was the reason but I can't seem to find any articles that express that outrage so I thought maybe there was a better reason. Do you know of any? On the other hand, I've found plenty of articles expressing anger at bailing out banks.

There were a ton of editorials in the NYT and WaPo to that effect a decade ago. I'm sure they're still online, but you'd have to dig through all the editorials from 2008-2010 to find them.