The Whiskey Rebellion is the strangest thing to cite. First of all, the Whiskey Rebellion was mostly just a gang of 500 people who beat up some tax collectors. When the President marched his army out to deal with them, they scattered without any bloodshed. It wasn't really a full scale rebellion. It is better to describe it as a violent anti-tax protest than a serious rebellion.
However, what ultimately happened was that the underlying issues to the Whiskey Rebellion were resolved via legal means: elections. The Whiskey Tax was the result of the efforts of Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist party. When Thomas Jefferson and his new Republican Party (now known as the Democratic Party, yeah is it confusing) were elected into power, they repealed the unpopular Whiskey Tax. Ah, the wonders of a functioning democratic system!
The very fact that the citizens of the new United States were able to use their votes to bring about the repeal of an unpopular tax is proof that they had indeed gained something from the American Revolution. There was no similar process in place for Americans to have repealed the Stamp Act prior to the revolution. That is the whole point: Britain did not treat its colonies, even those populated by people of British decent, as equals.
It would have been different if Britain had allowed colonists (and not just American colonists) to vote for representatives in Parliament. And not just some subordinate colonial parliament, but THE Parliament. If people in India could have elected their own representatives to Parliament, those representatives could have increased the amount of infrastructure investment in India, potentially saving millions of lives who died due to famine. But Britain as a whole had no interest in letting colonists have a say in British politics. Instead, they saw the colonies, even the American ones, as nothing more than a means to enrich the British Isles.
Is it really such a surprise that these colonies in this situation eventually decided to rebel?
The Whiskey rebellion is a fine example of the rebellion against the british repeating itself, it was a lot more than '500 people' who supported it, it was just crushed with overwhelming force from the government, something the British could not do against the US. But it was the exact same situation, with some groups believing in independance from the US.
Elections and democracy really did nothing to quell the rebellion, the law wasn't changed for many years after it had been ended by force.
Pre-revolution Colonists paid pretty much no tax aside from customs duties and such and despite receiving plenty of benefits from the British didn't like being taxed for it.
It's not like George Washington started a war with the French and the British had to fight it for seven years. Oh wait that is exactly what happened. That doesn't deserve any tax apparently though despite the debt it caused. It really wasn't about greed, at least not from the British, taxes
in Britain were higher than anywhere. Stuff just has to be paid for somehow and since the US caused a lot of debt, they should have paid it.
And please don't claim it wasn't about taxes, colonists complained about internal taxes made by the British, that is where the 'No Taxation without Representation' phrase came from, but when the British used external taxes so nothing to do with representation, the colonists complained anyway. When they had a chance at representation and having their own powers, it was turned down.
They just didn't like taxes, so started a revolution and, get this, allied with the nation that Britain protected them from, which caused the debt and the need to tax them in the first place.
Then they still got taxed anyway, worse than ever before. The revolution just caused a slight delay.