It’s absolutely safer browsing the internet now than it was when I was a kid. Getting a virus or equivalent on your phone is no small feat

It happens all the time, and its as easy as sending a phone a text, or a packet, or escaping a sandbox, but you'll rarely be aware of it when you're infected because unlike the old days where malware would fill your screen with ads or something today they just silently collect your data or use your internet connection for careful port scans or DDoS attacks. NSO Group spyware (or similar) could be on your phone right now.

Hell, cellphones these days ship with spyware pre-installed. Samsung being the one of the worst for filling their phones with their own apps which spy on you constantly.

Is it that much different? In the past if you downloaded the wrong file, you could get ads opening constantly, a new toolbar taking over your browser, data scraped and sent off to a mystery server, or have some process maximise your compute.

This accounted for most of the risks on the wild west internet, but the worst case scenario of permanently losing data or having to reinstall Windows was actually rarer than it was made out to be imho.

These days the common risks are the same, except they're no longer risks - all of those have been built into the fabric of everyday internet usage and criminals have been replaced by businesses. It's like the cliche about Vegas being better when it was run by the mob.

The late 90s internet was filled with predators, skeeziness, and viruses that would break your computer and require a reformatting.

That stuff is still there if you look for it, but it's not on your social media feeds or in any of the apps provided through app stores.