Backlinks are still a huge part of the algorithm and Google can’t accurately filter out the bought ones if you follow some basic selection criteria, so all they have left to do is instil fear in people that they’ll penalise you. Just buy backlinks purely from sites that have over 1k organic traffic according to Ahrefs and a healthy domain rating without any large cliffs in the amount of traffic/organic keywords they get and you can be almost completely certain the link won’t hurt you, and more than likely will actually help you.