Nothing to do at all with the topic or your spot on responses to the topic, but let me clarity the often mid advertised Everest statistic. It usually—as you’ve read—says something to the effect of “if you make it to the top, there’s a 25% [or whatever] chance you might not make it home". In reality this statement is the result of two decoupled concepts that are being emotionally conflated into an otherwise more visceral response. (Not unlike many in this thread.
). The first is the total number of summits, the second is the total number of deaths [regardless if the climber summited before dying, and ostensibly only counting deaths above basecamp].
The ratio between those two statistics--while somewhat nonsensical because they're very unrelated--has in the past been close enough to 4:1 to at least understand the origin of the mis-correlation. A more sensible ratio would be the number of attempts vs the number of deaths, and that number has likely always been
significantly less than 4:1 since the first documented attempts were made ~100 years ago, and certainly has been well below 4:1 for decades.
In the past two decades the summits and deaths numbers have significantly diverged, as popularity of the climb has risen. The Time article below has a pretty interesting data set; according to them there have been ~24k attempts, ~10k succesful summits, and ~300 deaths since Norgay drug Hillary up that hill. They don't include history before the 50's so there are some additional unsuccessful attempts (and deaths) that aren't accounted for, but not enough to really move the needle.
All that distilled into a soundbite: If you attempt to climb Everest, there's a ~1% chance you will die.
How Mount Everest's Deadly Season Compares to Past Years