I think safety has also taken a back step in modern dating. Previously you could ask around what a person was like and like you said, observe them passively. Now you are meeting a total stranger, you don't know anyone they know or anything about them.
An awful person gets to just reset their reputation every time, and in turn, people assume the worst by default.
As someone who used to go clubbing a lot there was more social interconnections than you might expect. Excluding tourists most of the people you met ended up being people who knew people you knew. Men/women with behavioural issues would often get a reputation. And there was a culture (especially among women, understandably) of warning someone if it looked like they were about to hook up with someone known to have some sort of form.
When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.
In some ways it’s easier. In my 40s I was meeting ppl online and one mentioned that she knew my name, where I had gone to university, and from those starting points learned a lot about me. Not enough to sustain more than a few dates but at least she knew I was not a convicted mass killer. And nowadays reverse image search and such means you can scope out your prospective date’s background.
Around the same time I met my now wife online and it turns out I knew several of her neighbours (she knew them all), had visited some of them, yet she and I had never met. So community cred isn’t automatic.
And I have friends who met in a bar 30-odd years ago, both who were there alone. So…?
An awful person gets to just reset their reputation every time, and in turn, people assume the worst by default.