I believe you may be confusing the term "bumper' with what you are seeing when you stand behind or in front of your car and look at it.
Bear with me here...bumpers used to be completely visible hunks of steel, right? Well back in the 50's and 60's they were but then in the 70's you started seeing big ugly black rubber pieces bolted onto the metal bumper to "extend" the bumper. This only served to make them fugly ugly and did little to protect them since the rubber pieces were only on two areas of the bumpers, see here what I mean in the pix.. .
If you look at the 1976 BMW 2002 in the pic, they tried to comply with the US Fed standard by extending their bumper out on collapsible plastic covered rods and then put accordion rubber pieces on the end sides to cover the gap to the body...ok, "maybe" it was better than the Dolly Parton look but it was still unsightly. I used to own one and hated that approach.
So, all auto mfg's selling to the US were under pressure to meet the ever changing Fed standards yet design appealing looking cars. So they simply covered the entire front end of the car with plastic shapes that hid the real bumpers beneath them, this is what you have today on your X5. What else could they do? So we have what we have today.
Go into any dealership today, any, and if you crawl under the front or rear of the new cars, you will see the real steel bumper hiding behind the external plastic covering. Well, you probably can't see it due to all the plastic covers under the car but you can if you go into a body shop and look at a new car. See bottom pix for the real metal bumper and your plastic covering for your X5.
Also, I've included a couple of pix showing the metal bumper behind the plastic cover on a domestic car (red one) and something you have probably seen a number of times on the road, a car with the corner of the bumper pushed in.
Yes, it causes a lot of expensive repair on any of today's cars, not just BMW. However, the cars look nice. In terms of your outlook on insurance, no question, we are all paying upfront for the unlikely chance we will need to use it. That's why I mentioned I was happy to have had the opportunity to use mine to pay 100% of my two BMW windshield replacements (0 deductible too). Thing is, you and I will always be paying for car insurance whether we use it or not, has nothing to do with what car we own. Here in NYS, we are not allowed to get license plates without first showing proof of insurance.
So divide the $8K repair cost, less any deductible, by your yearly insurance cost over the last decade and be happy that you are finally getting a chance to use it, maybe even break even
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