How about, wildly dangerous relative to other commercial passenger jets? Second in fatal accidents per million miles flown only to the Concorde, which didn't fly very much. Why would you want to continue flying a plane that was statistically 5-10x more fatal than peers? Surely there's no good reason to subject passengers to that, even if it were still relatively safer than automobile fatalities or whatever else you might compare to, not when safer aircraft are generally available?

https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

(Note this data is only up to 2019 for 737 models, but that's exactly the time period at which decisions had to be made, of whether to continue flying it or not).