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I'm old enough to have been one of those infected with measles before the vaccine was available. And you're correct - we pretty much all got it and I don't know anyone who died from it.

While that was the typical outcome, it wasn't so in every case. Author Roald Dahl wrote in 1988:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it.
Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything.
"Are you feeling all right?" I asked her.
"I feel all sleepy," she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.

Roald Dahl

Dahl's experience, as well as mine, is anecdotal. Fortunately, health organizations keep track of these things. During the years I grew up, there were about 400-500 measles deaths annually, close to 50,000 hospitalizations and about 4,000 cases of encephalitis. In 1890, the Mississippi valley from the Canadian border to Missouri suffered measles deaths at a rate of 20/1000.(History of Measles) Today, in some of the poorest and unvacccinated places in the world, the rate is 1/100. (University of Oxford)

Based on this information, I'm glad my children and grandchildren were vaccinated. Others might assess the data differently.