Energy is at the core of economic development and Germany and a bunch of other countries were able to get gas for decades.
There is no single concience called Germany that may definitively answer the question of whether it benefits them.
As is often the case, people benefetting from this relationship are not the ones paying the price when something goes wrong.
For every 1 billion of economic benefit produced by this relationship, this war has destroyed 5.
most lukely, without this relationship, the qar would not be possible.
And you’ve noticed yourself that the benefits accrued in the EU and the costs were incurred in Ukraine. But this is oversimplifying things - the Ukraine war has other important geopolitical facets besides the admittedly important energy aspect, such as NATO expansion.
It's the same here, but with selling energy to "capitalists".
What Europeans might have seen as purely economic affair for the USSR / Russia was just means of getting money to grow and support its army, to buy Western politicians and media influence, etc.
Practically you’re not though, because as history attests, the USSR dissolved peacefully and thorough all the ups and downs the economic relationship survived.
This is perhaps why the warnings from the US were ignored for so long: they were based on self-interest and they had a track record of being wrong for decades.
'Why Germany pipes down when talk turns to Nord Stream 2 sanctions | Chancellor Olaf Scholz won’t say pipeline is finished if Russia attacks Ukraine, despite strong pressure from allies.' 2022 February 8 https://www.politico.eu/article/olaf-scholz-silence-on-nord-...
It's not falsified. It may have improved conditions for peace; the situation could have been far worse now. Real-world issues don't work out neatly; they are extremely complex; you never know what the alternative outcome would have been.
As an analogy, eating healthy food and getting exercise isn't 'falsified' as health recommendations when someone happens to die young.