I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her.
She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her name was a Project Veritas video where they had cornered her to ask some questions about her workplace and skewer her for whatever soundbites they could get. It was heartbreaking.
It’s an example of the benefits of the “security through obscurity” security posture. If there’s lots of info about you online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative information.
The “stay offline / stay ungoogleable” security posture, on the other hand, is fragile with respect to random spikes of negative information.
Reality is that there’s a gray area and most people have middling risk tolerance in this area. As for me, I rarely post on social media and have never deliberately cultivated an online presence, so I’m somewhat ungoogleable. But not so much that someone couldn’t find me if they really tried. An seo-heavy event like that Project Veritas thing would probably take over my SEO presence, but I’m okay with that risk, and I also have the skills to spin up an official personal site if I want to.
Take me, for an example. Google Greg Maxwell. You'll get a smear piece written by the associates of the fraudster that claims to invented bitcoin title "Crypto Crime Cartel: Greg Maxwell" several pages ahead of my own webpage (https://nt4tn.net/) which shows up only on the sixth page where essentially no one will see it. (hey, at least the smear piece not #1 anymore-- It was for a long time.)
(You could add 'bitcoin' to the search to get rid of most of the people who aren't me-- the "crime cartel" article is result #2 then, and my page is at the bottom of page 4-- again where few people are ever likely to see it-- after several other smear pages.)
So I think the threat of negative material is mostly orthogonal. You're probably better off invisible, you're screwed either way if someone well funded wants to trash your name.