If you don't know how things works with the kind of trading you are using it's true that danger or risk is just along the corner.
Stop and loss is very effective if you fully understand the market, the volatility might give you decent benefits if you play well but it's always a case to case market movements, same from what you have said, whales is very unpredictable as they can make the market move within a split of a seconds.
Honestly if you do not know that is another story, but if you do know and still do not use then it is a whole another story as well. There are people who do not use stop loss even though they know what it means, just because they believe that they could DCA their way out of it. I am "sort of" in the middle, I do not use stop loss because I am a long term investor and I do not care about the price of today, and I do keep on buying so it is sort of like the one who do not use it, but there are traders that do not use it as well and try to make it profitable in a bit longer and yet still a trader way.
This is why I honestly believe that we should not be focusing on knowing or not knowing, we should be focusing on the benefits of using and the damages of not using, that way we could actually calculate the risk and take our precautions accordingly.