Both things can be true; there can be both a moral panic about the exaggerated harms of unrestricted internet access, but also as the internet became commonplace and law enforcement not keeping up, it's plausible and likely there are many more predators on it now than it was back in our days.

Not to mention that getting onto the internet back in our day required a relative level of technical proficiency which could've filtered out vulnerable children, where as today there is no barrier. The corporate push to share personal data everywhere (often nowadays it's hard/impossible to operate pseudonymously - which doesn't seem to stop bad guys in any way but puts legitimate users at risk) doesn't help; in my days the number 1 rule was to never share PII on the internet, which nowadays doesn't exist and is difficult to implement in practice even if you tried.