Those on the mod squad that I am a member of their discord or patreon did say they are keeping their sites available. This is just another site you can visit to download their mods and update.
There is no charge at all to use curseforge to download mods
I use curseforge for W.o.W. and have had no problem with malware etc when downloading mods for it.
As for mess up your mod folder I don't know as I have never made changes to my mod for W.o.W but if you are worried about that make a copy of your mod folder and place on a usb drive or your desktop and after download a couple pieces of cc or mods compare the two folders and see what changes were made if any were made besides the new mods or cc you just downloaded, also do the same just before update and see how the updates went
