Yeah, black holes in media where they are depicted as a giant space vacuum cleaner is a big pet peave of mine. Unless you get really close, nothing is remarkable about the orbital mechanics of a black hole. The equivalent mass star would have burned you up at a much further distance than the gravity starts to become noticeably wonky.

It's a shame that writers focus so much on the gravity and neglect accretion disks and astrophysical jets which do extend large distances and are visually stunning as well.

To be fair I think "light can't escape" thing really just is that wild, it's pretty captivating. The idea of it being the death of a star, one of the most important things to all life we know about, only adds to that sense. Stars are massive billion-year explosions, yes, but they also bring warmth and light and beauty. Black holes are the death of all of that, even if it's not technically more dangerous from the same distance

Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet?

The sun isn't heavy enough to go supernova. (Unless it has a companion, but there's no evidence of one so far.)

Pop sci-fi seems to be fond of intermediate-mass black holes (EG Interstellar, Star Trek StrangeNew Worlds), and for something kinda the size of a star, they are "scary."

In other instances (like in TV Foundation), a close orbit to the accretion disk is a source of suspense.

And then there's the "stealth" aspect. Stellar-mass ones and below are very small and (potentially) quiet for something with the mass of a star, eg easy to stumble upon.

And in some very advanced universes (eg the online Orion's Arm), even with "hard" sci fi, swimming through a star's nuclear plasma is totally doable. But a black hole is an impossible boundry of physics, and an particularly extreme object useful for astroengineering.

They are like stars in the sense of orbital mechanics.

But a star can be completely understood by the laws of physics we know. While a black hole breaks our understanding and we have no idea what's going on in there.

It's the fear of the unknown.