The Pleidians also “saluted us for our courage.” Is that because of the likelihood of violence being inflicted on us?

This is indeed the case. It is well known to all who enter Earth plane that things could tip in the favor of the extraterrestrials and result in annihilation of humanity, in addition to the many individual calamities that arise from interacting with these hostile species among you, when people are killed arbitrarily, or abducted for transport to slave colonies, and come to an unpleasant ending. All humans involved in the current enterprise were aware of this before they incarnated and many have served multiple lifetimes in which they were harmed gravely through deprivation imposed by harsh rulers serving the Extraterrestrial Alliance and may have been imprisoned and tortured or killed in a grisly fashion for working against the established order.