First off the airplane itself was safe. Modern airliners are designed to be EXTREMELY robust and can handle almost any turbulence. Even if bins pop open or plastic trim pieces fall off the cabin wall, the structure and important systems are just fine.

Most turbulence is predictable and we make efforts to avoid or minimize, mainly for pax comfort. Sometimes it's not practical to go around it (fuel), or it's just too widespread to avoid. Then you have to ride it out.

There's a type of turbulence called Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) which is harder to predict and can be severe enough to cause injuries to pax and crew who are not seated and buckled up. When you read about injuries on long-haul over-water flights, that's usually the cause. Like they say, keep your seatbelt on if you don't need to be up and about.

The turbulence at the core of a very large thunderstorm could damage an airliner (light aircraft are sometimes destroyed when foolish enough to fly into that). But that's easy to avoid for us, onboard radar and ATC radar has no trouble at all detecting thunderstorms, and we just don't fly into them.

I don't recall any airliner crashes due to turbulence in recent history, you'd probably have to go back 60-70 years to find one, in the days when radar technology wasn't very good.