It surprises me that people browse with so little protection. I'm super paranoid, and every so often I run scans, check files, and delete cookies—just to be on the safe side. Personally, I use Brave with a DDG extension to cover my tracks online, and I also use a pop-up blocker to avoid those annoyances.
For example, there are games with broken links that you can find on a website that starts with R, and usually when a game is broken, that’s where I find them. But on that site, to get to the links, you have to go through a bunch of crappy redirects packed with ads, and it turns into a maze of clicks where you can end up anywhere. And even when you finally get to the files and download them, I’ve had my antivirus send them straight to the trash because it detected a virus.
That said, I also have quite a few games saved from there to restore links in case they break—all clean and safe.