The first Exchange I used when I didn't know anything was Cryptopia, but then there were many problems with that exchange, they were treated as scammers and everything, until recently I heard that they were telling their clients that they were going to return the funds that were pending, I did not know more about it, but after that I have only stayed with Binance, it seems to me that it is the most reliable Exchange although sometimes I have found some vulnerabilities with respect to the fact that they always get carried away a lot by government orders, that is what I do not like.
I think Cryptopia was quite popular centralized exchange since 2017-2018, when it was most favourite exchange for a lot users. As far as i know it was affected by hackers and all of users lost their funds and i also lost a few tokens. I heard that the police investigation is going on but i didn’t keep any news of it later but i think this exchange users didn’t get refund yet.