What disturbs me is that things of this same sort certainly happen today, and we as consumers are likely just as blind to it as they were then

Vapes come to mind

Vapes genuinely would be a huge amount safer than tobacco if people were using the kind of vapes that the comparative studies were done with. However, in real life, people buy the cheap ones and/or the dodgy imported-despite-not-meeting-local-regulation ones, where it's just not viable to do things like avoid contaminating them with heavy metals like Cadmium. Cheap smuggled cigarettes aren't that much worse than regular cigarettes. Cheap smuggled disposable vapes are much worse than top-end reusable vapes.

While the Cadmium is bad because its a heavy metal, I thought the worse things from bad vapes was the other metals in the alloys in the heating element such as Nickel and Chromium. One specific risk is the production of hexavalent chromium from the heating element. This compound has this wonderful side effect from osha.gov:

"Certain hexavalent chromium compounds produced lung cancer in animals that had the compounds placed directly in their lungs."

I was doing home experiments creating hydrogen at small scales using cheap stainless steel electrodes for electrolysis. While I was in a highly ventilated area, when I learned that hexavalent chromium was being produced I gave up on it because the health risks weren't worth it, and I wasn't doing something that directly inhaled the gases produced, unlike vaping.