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The practical answer is that, if 99.9% of people out there has system that mitigates these issues, no one will bother using these exploits in the wild and you can turn off these mitigations to get the perf benefit and be reasonably sure that you won't get exploited. Unless you're targeted of course.

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But "we", being the average tech expert, also has no way to know when that 1% will hit.

It takes only one creative genious to turn the next security issue into a thing that does affect us all. Some worm that eats all linuxes, a virus that spreads through all bsds or something that installs crypto miners on every second android or so. We cannot know.

And so we cannot defend ourselves against that. And so it's useless to worry about it. But it will happen. Our systems are way too monoculture, both soft- and hardware, to be protected against a digital potato famine.

If 99.9% of people can be exposed to the same malicious code and not even be aware that it was running in the background, it's all the more reason for a malicious actor to expose the largest amount of people to it with relatively minimal risk.

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