Inserting and tapping is mostly the same process, apart from the physical layer of the protocol (NFC vs interfacing the chip directly).

Unless there’s a hidden magnetic reader in the chip-reading portion of the terminal, in which case the scammers could read like 1/3 of the magstripe data? Which doesn’t seem that useful tbh.

Physical connection doesn't matter. This isn't a Hollywood movie, there isn't some mega-virus which magically seizes controls of trivial objects by passing through a connector.

All three modern technologies ("original" Chip & PIN, wireless or a phone) are basically the EMV protocol, which is a fairly crap protocol which wasn't reviewed by experts before deployment - but is at least designed by people who have heard about cryptographic security and wanted to do that.

The original credit cards are just numbers written on a card. Clerk sees your number, memorizes it, now they can make arbitrary transactions indistinguishable from yours. Basically no security.

Magnetic stripe cards look more sophisticated but the stripe is basically the same numbers again but in a way humans cannot read. "Cloning" is just a matter of a machine copying those numbers onto another card's magnetic stripe. There's no real security improvement, though it is more convenient for the bank...

EMV ("Chip and PIN") is rather more complicated and could in principle be entirely secure - they could make it implausibly expensive to "clone" an EMV card, and require that you actually know your PIN for every transaction, so then crooks would need to learn your PIN and have the actual card, and that's a high bar.

In practice we didn't do much of that because it would be inconvenient, and so there are technical deficiencies, but realistically that XKCD "wrench" thing applies. Difficult technological attacks rarely happen, crooks threaten to stab you if you don't co-operate or they break into your home and steal your stuff, they do not come up with breakthrough cryptanalytic attacks on protocols. Mostly.