If you had two scenarios:
1. Great OPSEC, high profile
2. OK OPSEC, minimal profile
You're still at greater risk for scenario #1. When Ross Ulbricht did his Forbes interview and basically said "I dare the gov't to shut me down", he pretty much guaranteed they'd go to the ends of the earth to shut him down.
The only thing worse than committing multiple felonies is making the gov't look stupid or weak.
But precise targeted activities that require investigation later are pretty ease to have sufficient OPSEC for.
More seriously, there's an element of performative deterrence in the way stuff like this gets handled. Giving people without the experience to know it's nonsense the idea they can't do dark web crimes and get caught probably cuts down on the rate of people dipping a toe into the exciting world of dark web crimes, where they can for example learn how to not get caught and then talk on the open web about how much they know I guess? What kind of opsec is that?
in the universe of dark web activities, most of them are not crimes and of the crimes most of those do not require stonewalling an eventual multi-jurisdictional state actor
there are just different OPSEC models, if we aren't talking about crimes its fine to talk on the open web about them, some of those OPSEC models would still accomplish thwarting the aforementioned threat model.
Well yes, for the people that get caught.
and then the DOJ always says "see! this proves you can't hide from us"
and everyone else on darknet is like "yeah here's the refined checklist implementation for how not to get caught and here's why" which should be like everyone's first purchase on any darknet market for $.99 and should be any vendor's primary first item for sale to gain reputation
I pretty much never see indictments that actually undermine the best practices.... you don't need to pay to understand the best practices, but it does save time to see what the tools are that implement those best practices, or understanding why some secret chat apps should be avoided versus others.