Flying in small planes is a huge thing, not just for fun or hobby. It has literally been going on for decades and an essential service in many cases. If it were as fraught as you make it seem in terms of actual statistics of the danger, it would not be this way, yet it is this way.
Do the statistics not show this to be the case though? I only know anecdotally that life insurance premiums go way, way, way up when one flies small aircraft.
In the same sense as sex is overrated. Shooting a hand-flown ILS approach right down the wire to minimums; pop out and see the runway lights displayed right in front of you. I’ll take that risk.
Spoken like someone who's never taken flight. Once you've flown a plane, you'll never want to not
Edit: wasn't specific about differentiating between small and large planes. I'm more keen on flying a large plane but small ones seem too accident prone
However, the corollary to this is that the biggest sources of risk are largely under the pilot's control and can be reduced through recurrent high-quality training. Careful preflight planning, setting conservative personal minimums, avoiding fatigue, and not accepting normalization of deviance come into play as well.
[1]: https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institut...