Spoiler: they made a pact never to argue and took self-imposed time-outs when they lapsed. One broke his leg and they cared for him so well it healed perfectly. They planted a vegetable garden and kept their spirits up singing along to a guitar they fashioned from driftwood and a coconut shell.
(Article is weirdly focused on the white guy who rescued them, though.)
The thing is that Golding wouldn’t be surprised, because he didn’t intend Lord of the Flies to reflect upon human nature. He wrote it to reflect upon the nature of upper-class English schoolboys, specifically in response to a very saccharine story by another author where upper-class English schoolboys form a eutopia. He’d be mortified at the way schools teach it, and validated that the kids in this article did not, in fact, degenerate into evil little shits.
Seen a lot of hot takes on Twitter saying that the book is racist and that it’s a comment on colonialism or something, when like the above commenter says it was based on Golding’s own experience with how shitty public school-taught British schoolboys were/are.
If Lord of the Flies was summed up in a headline it would be “Commentary on Assholes mistaken for Commentary on Humanity”