Much much much worse. Remember the early days of the Pandemic the case fatality rate was something like 10%. A thread from that time.. Serious cases are still about 1/3 deaths.
In this era of global communications and coordination, effective management practices spread fast, if someone in Pittsburg discovers a way to reduce adverse outcomes, it will spread and be copied from Paris to Peshawar to Perth. More or less in real-time. In earlier Pandemics, people did find ways to manage the outbreak but these were randomly spread and uncoordinated. And of course we have far superior disease surveillance now. In many ways we have never been more ready to face a pandemic.
Covid is in the unfortunate sweet spot that it’s not mild enough to be ignored (like common flu) and not deadly enough that the sick remove themselves very quickly after infection from the society and it burns out. Like SARS and MERS.
The Spanish flu actually was not really much more deadly than normal flu, but the circumstances of the outbreak were such that it conincided with the demobilisation post WW1, so lots of sick soldiers were released into the community. Bad times.
Plus the death rate in the non-western world was appalling since most of it was ruled by European powers who DNGAF if nonwhites died.