No these creatures are not common.
They’re bloody unavoidable!
Don’t get me wrong, I love all nature and will often stop and watch an orb weaver if it’s a nice specimen.
But my enjoyment of them nearly ended one evening when I stayed too long without a torch on an isolated beach, forgetting that the forest trail was inundated with particularly startling specimens of these large spiders.
A long stick waved about wildly didn’t stop at least two from getting on me.
The desperation they caused did remind me that I had a paper lantern buried somewhere in my pack. But that was after I was close to tears, and think of having a good cry.
Incidentally a lantern blinds you to everything but what is right in front of your nose, as I discovered later when I blundered into the 500 cows that used the trail to make their night trip over the ridge. The trail was about 3ft wide through dense scrub so I wasn’t very happy.
You’ll be pleased to know that you can get cheap LED torches that fit on a key-ring these days. There’s two on mine.