I have most of mine on an exchange because I'm getting paid interest. Has there ever been a time when an exchange like Binance for example, steals your funds or gets hacked and people lost money?
Are you not aware of exchanges hacking incident? Regardless of the reputation of the particular exchange the risk is always there either your finds might be stolen (compromise), freezing of account or hacking. Thats why its not advisable to store your crypto on exchanges for long and use it as your wallet. Like what other user's said, "not your keys, not your coins" so better to hold your bitcoin securely by holding your own private keys in a trusted wallet.
There is one thing that I would like to share, a few months ago, the police of a country that is not Colombia, put Binance to investigate all Binance accounts of Colombians, and the Exchange itself blocked them all from submitting to the investigation going through above the integrity of their clients and the Colombian authorities, and until they finished carrying out their investigation they did not leave them alone, then that is a reason not to leave the money in an Exchange. I think that everyone is free to have their income wherever they want, but it is better to have total control over our money, without the need to submit to events imposed by governments and third parties.