Even assuming these features would help stop phishing (which I don't agree with), you can't make every single feature super easy and obvious. In addition, you can't infer anything about a design from a single user's experience with it.
And frankly, the Settings window and the View menu are not obscure places to put these options. Those are the first places you should look if you're in a Mac app and want to configure the UI.
If Safari was a 1:1 clone of Chrome but without (probably) sending my stuff to Google, I'd be all over it. Millions of other Mac users too. Instead I'm using Chrome on Mac just to get many websites to even work.
Why do we need yet another one clone of chrome? The majority of noticeable browsers nowadays are chrome clones. If you do not want to use chrome due to sending data to google, you can use chromium, brave, vivaldi, opera...
Parent commenter here. Before submitting that comment I literally checked once again to try and find these settings. I looked through the General, Tabs, Security, Privacy, and Websites settings. It didn't occur to me to look in Advanced for a display setting. I also looked through View, but never would have guessed that "status bar" is the name for the link preview feature.