I wasn’t aware of this, when did it start? So far, it has never happened to me not to be able to view reddit threads

Same here. Maybe it partly has to do with age, but definitely not only. I get super nostalgic about very few things - this game is one of them.

I agree, people don’t really pay attention or bother to read about stuff like How to check if a QR code is safe. Honestly, I’ve been dealing with QR codes for quite a while, and I still occasionally spend time looking things up, reading about quishing, and whatever new scam/term appears.