Insurance is for minimizing losses you can't afford. Term life insurance is good if you have dependents and their life would be negatively impacted by the loss of your income. There is very little profit and commission in term life insurance, so life insurance salesmen will push whole life.
Whole life insurance is rarely necessary, and extremely expensive compared to the alternatives. See links below.
Also it's used as a part of a strategy to hide money from taxes in a term policy, where you can later "borrow" against your premiums to pull your money out later in a lower tax situation. That seems to be the main purpose of large life insurance policies I have seen among wealthy people.
That applies to so few people though. Most people who buy it are just wasting money. In my experience, immigrants with few assets who don't know better are targeted by immigrants of their own race (since they're presumed to be more trustworthy).