My experience has been that purchasing airline tickets, hotels, etc non direct always carries a risk of some sort of problem. So I tend to go directly.

Many 3rd party sites tend to be their own scam IMO.

Fair. I believe some OTA is like Google flights enable you to price shop but still buy direct

Sure but a lot of people use 3rd party sites for price discovery and then book direct,and of the direct purchase is consistently dramatically more they'll likely mentally blacklist that airline.