This is an important point. When I first started using the internet in the late 80s there was nary a non-mil site (and even those were iffy) that I couldn't ge

This is an important point. When I first started using the internet in the late 80s there was nary a non-mil site (and even those were iffy) that I couldn't get into almost instantaneously using remote exploits in widely used software like sendmail; and once in it was almost trivial to get root escalation, often through fairly well known (by the standards of the time) issues with the way suid root programs would badly parse environmental variables that you could maliciously malform to get the suid program to execute other arbitrary programs. Things were much less complex back then but the security was far worse on the whole than it is today. People would just telnet around! In plaintext! On local networks that were largely switch-free with ethernet adapters that would gladly go into promiscuous listening mode. Not to mention things like full-blown IP spoofing before ingress/egress filtering was common and all the TCP stacks had terribly predictable sequencing. The important things that changed are as you said that dramatically greater number of people are impacted by these issues, and to a lesser degree the people hacking into systems back then on average were less likely to have any malicious intent or financial motives (the change with this is somewhat directly related to the first point).