Well, you could land on a bad site full of nasty ads or wind up downloading software that offered you the finest of malware or viruses.
And you could just not go to them, or not download sus programs or warez.
Now the sites and apps hunt you down and shove it in your face. They follow you, rat on you, sell your info, and constantly try to sell
You stuff every page you land on.
Yeah, Old Internet wasn’t great, but it wasn’t institutionalized malice like we have today.