No, it never really has been. Death penalties are low, 5% instead of your current ship's value is nothing. Today we even got engineered ships vs vanilla NPCs and since NPCs never have been challenging in AI, they are at a serious disadvantage.
Modes provide a safe haven for non-PvP players, okay fine, but atleast make PvE challenging. And by challenging I mean challenging for players who know what they are doing and don't struggle with docking their ships.
I am sitting on billions and billions of credits and assets, you'll never make me lose a single ship and you'll never put me under financial pressure, you'll never make me hurt through a rebuy and you'll never put me under any kind of pressure because there simply is zero risk at the moment. The worst thing that can happen to you is an inconvinience when you get ported back some lightyears and you have to jump somewhere again, that's the worst possible outcome for a collection of catastrophic failures on the human/player side. And for that to happen alot of properties have to be in place first. All that for an inconvinience. My transfer fees are higher than my rebuys.
Yes, there is absolutely no risk. Even for new players there are none. A little bit of void opal mining and you got your credits, grind your ranks and engineers and you reached the endgame in a month. Then, what?