This is not the norm these days! There are popular mod loaders like curseforge that pulled from moderated repositories. It’s still not bulletproof, but a far cry from trusting some installer executable

I prefer modrinth as well, both are good but curseforge has done some things which makes us require an api etc. for true automation where modrinth is genuinely nice.

I used to use prism launcher which would just give me a search box and It on the side would have things like modrinth / curseforge etc., Usually I preferred Modrinth but there were some modpacks just on curseforge only but I never really downloaded a shady modpack from some random website aside from these two, In fact sometimes I never opened up a website but just prismlauncher itself lol

+1 for Prism Launcher and Modrinth! I use Prism on my Steam Deck. I would’ve mentioned them both but Curseforge was the only name I could remember