Back then we didn't have this particular modern meme of "extremely dangerous" for something like a syntactically inaccurate file so I suppose no one said it was "extremely dangerous" for people to copy-paste code from searches. SQL injection was fairly novel at the time but as that came up people would mock copy-paste scripters rather than act as if man's extinction was at hand from a vibe-coded single-page app that tells you which Pokemon you are.
Yes, yes, it's different now. But it was different then too. Search engines changed the stuff you could find from carefully curated Usenet channels to any rando with a blog. I suppose if we had modern sensibilities we'd say that was "extremely dangerous" too.
I've been writing code for decades, and it's true that I've seen nothing like this technology. It's true that it's a game changer and that with slightly different rates of change could have already lead to human extinction. But that doesn't mean that I have to lay any more credence to the guys who have, since time immemorial, said "this new thing makes something easier; it will make us worse because we do not slog as much".