Hardware wallets are my first recommendation for anyone who wants to buy bitcoin.
They are safe, and most sad histories of people losing coins would never have happened if they used a hardware wallet.
That's true. Sadly, they don't protect against the most common schemes we see in the crypto scene and that's social engineering, such as phishing. Not even a hardware wallet can help you if you can get tricked into entering your seed on a website and thereby sending your keys and coins to scammers.
Common sense and basic understanding of online security will do wonders, though.