Uh no. I was there. In 1995 or 1996, I may have still used a shareware CD-ROM, or some less-legal compilation CD-ROM, but in the 2000s the most common way to install software by far was to download it over the internet

I've pulled up some historic data and it looks you're right and I've underestimated how much "my place" lagged behind the world at a time. Of course, if you've had unlimited access in 1996 that makes sense. For me, I have an artifact from the past right in front of me - a router manufactured in 2008, still chugging along, which I've bought when the first truly unlimited plans hit the market, so it made sense to share a connection rather than having a separate account with ISP for every family member. It was only 64k, though, so not downloading a ~~car~~ movie or a game at those speeds. The gray networks persisted all the way into mid 2010s as far as I know.

I think the point of the post is that back then people were warned against installing bonzi buddy and such, and we were told to install software only from trustworthy sources. Spyware software rightfully flagged such software as malware too

Might be another cultural difference, but this is not at all the experience I've had. In fact, just the other day I myself had to spin up a VM to launch a some random-ass app from, of all things, a CD that was handed to me, though this is quite a bit out of the ordinary. But I'd say the attitude didn't change, people are still just as likely and to launch random shit from a USB drive as they were to insert random CD's. And while AV software has improved, people are now less likely to use it. Defaulting to windows defender, which, in personal experience, is only good at catching pirated copies of microsoft software and nothing more. Or relying on google/apple, which is also problematic.

Just out of curiosity, by the way, how many people from your circle do you think have the "Allow app installs from Unknown Sources" checked? For me, that'd be at least a third of them.

Nowadays, there are appstores full of banal apps which harvest much more personal information about you than bonzi buddy ever did and we’re not batting an eye about it, and even though we have “Access control” we just happily click accept when our calculator wants to read our emails, and we’ve accepted it as a normal way of doing things.

To me it sounded like the initial post was glorifying how good it was then versus how bad it is now, while missing on all of the technical progress that happened. Sure, apps collect much more data than they ever did. But on the other hand, bonzi buddy was more than capable of stealing all of your money and nuking your device. In my eyes, it is more important than people giving away their personal info by being careless.

As for the carelessness, though, I don't think that's a tech nor a new problem. People just never ask "why?" and "what for?" nearly as often as they should. Even if sometimes this is literally a question of life and death, most people don't even care to ask...