In hindsight, knowing that everyone died, it is obvious that just about any other decision, including sleeping on the cold hard ground under the stars or calling random strangers and begging for help, would have been a better decision.
At the time, with a bunch of folks all thinking that they could get a lift back home to comfortable beds in their own homes, it's easy to see how the final holes in the Swiss cheese lined up.
- The guy with the twin wouldn't have agreed to fly over and pick them up if he thought his plane was going to crash and kill everybody.
- The pax wouldn't have gotten on the rescue flight if they thought the plane was going to crash and kill them.
- In short, nobody ever thought, "I'm making a choice between begging for help from strangers who would be extremely inconvenienced vs. getting killed."
They only thought they were going home, and so they all happily climbed onboard.
Maybe if there were a Motel 6 adjacent to the field, or a 24/7 shuttle bus into town, or even a cab or Uber, they would have been more likely to consider other options. But as has been repeatedly pointed out, the only other options were things that looked like essentially impossibilities. Compare those options against "there's a plane coming to pick us up, yay!" and ask yourself honestly if you would have insisted on staying on the island overnight if you were in that group?
Pilots (and passengers, often unwittingly) make bad choices and get away with it dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of times a day. The vast majority of those events we never hear about. This was almost one of those events, right up until it wasn't.
