Those were people just messing around. Annoying and harmful to your local machine certainly, but the harm that was caused was localized.
Security vulnerabilities are now industrialized, with large-scale public attacks and widespread silent compromises used to gather and sell your information for profit. The situation is still bad, it's just bad in a different way.
But there are zillions more computers, doing more things, with more interconnections than ever before. So the problems are compounded and I think the situation is worse overall.
Unfortunately, that only holds if you take the view that IoT appliance != computer.
Because let's be honest - those things are dangerous to general network hygiene and wellbeing.
Many of these devices aren't patched after they're sold, and can be compromised within minutes of being assigned a publicly routable IP - this is what happened with Mirai.
Security is better for desktop computers, but if you include everything with an operating system, it's much, much worse.
At the very least you should be able to stay secure if you know what you are doing. But even that’s not enough. You also need to be lucky && uninteresting && not actually using computers.
Side-tangent, but security enthusiasts need to calm down on the "world is ending" talk. Those of us who lived through Windows ME, where logging on IRC basically gave you a 25% chance of having your computer hijacked by some random script kiddie, think it's laughable to say that security is anywhere near as bad as it used to be. Night and day.