Ya, no pirate worth their salt would risk it at this point. It's so infested with malware, with seemingly no moderation, and no meaningful original releases.
People me saying this but what malware is in mkv files? I don’t understand why anyone takes the risk of pirating software, that’s obviously all infected.
And TPB gets those MKVs seemingly faster than any other site I’ve seen and with a ui that’s easier to use due to not being modern garbage
If TPB tells you to download a malicious MKV file, it might be specially crafted to exploit a vulnerability in your video player. For instance, VLC had a vulnerability in 2019: https://www.videolan.org/security/sa1901.html
The chances of an mkv or mp4 containing malware are not zero, but might as well be, imo. You're much more likely to encounter moviefilename.mkv.exe or moviefilename.zip which contains an executable of some kind. Basically traps to take advantage of dumbasses. If you even sort of know what you're doing using tpb for purely media is okay. Hypothetically, of course.
And a myriad of fake ones piggybacking off the original URL to JavaScript your mouse clicks into link backs so it takes 8 clicks on a link to find the file is dead anyway.