The biggest danger of leverage is the "margin call" or calling the loan - the most common form of leverage people are exposed to prohibit this calling - if you buy a house today on a normal 30 year fixed mortgage in the USA, the bank cannot call the loan if you continue to make payments, even if the house value drops way below the original amount collateralized.

In some states, such as California, a purchase loan is non-recourse, so you could walk away (and many did in the last housing downturn) and the bank can't do anything beyond take the house.

This means if you can weather the downturn you don't get wiped out, you borrowed 80% of the house to buy, put 20% down, it went down 30%, you were underwater, but continued to make payments, and now it's up 20% above where you started.

Margin loans against stocks, etc do not have this, so if you borrowed against $1k worth of stocks you had, and they dropped in value below what the bank wants you to keep as collateral, they can force you to sell at the lower price (or produce more cash/collateral). This means that with leverage you could be right in the long term but wiped out in the short term.