[Scandiravian]

Autism is a spectrum disorder. There are many who can live high functioning lives, there are also those who never learn to speak and require assistance there entire life.

I'm guessing most of the people you've met are high functioning, so there's a bias in what your understanding of autism is

In more severe forms of autism a combination of learning disabilities and the inability to read facial expressions can make it hard to parse what is considered "horrible" for the people suffering from the condition

That does not mean they lack empathy or desires harm in others. The issue is that they need help and support parsing the environment around them

Of cause some might need to be denied access to certain things like knives or social media because their inability to understand could be a danger to their surroundings, but that's a situation for a minority of people with autism