One has to remember that since nearly everybody chucks in flying shortly after getting their PPL, the community you actually see active at any instant are mostly "old-timers".
I did my JAA PPL in 2000/2001 and we never did notams, the AIP, or anything whatever to do with the internet.
And I am a very "young" pilot, relative to the bulk of the pilot community I see when I go flying.
Sure one needs internet competence to fly nowadays (apart from trivial local popups where you look out of the window, and stay in the local area, and fly without a transponder the rest of the time
) but it has been poorly covered during all the years when it could have been covered i.e. from the late 1990s onwards. And you have the wider issue of how to teach someone of say 60+ who has never used a computer to suddenly start, just so they can fly.
Internet notams date back to 2003 in the UK, and the notam system was impractical (for pilots venturing outside the flying school environment, or the local area) before then.
Re midairs, they fortunately are very rare, and fortunately the scenario is quite predictable statistically: in or near the circuit, and mostly below ~1500ft. The popularly cited risks (overflying VORs, overflying VRPs, flying in/through glider sites, etc) are not supported statistically, and the most popularly cited and perhaps the most instinctively/emotionally worrying one (flying in IMC OCAS) is not supported at all, with
zero midairs since WW2.