With Magento 1.9 you could run scheduled tasks via a wget request. This does not work anymore and needs to be scheduled via cron jobs.
People here writing that cron jobs are safer, these people are wrong. I challenge anyone here defending this (incorrect) point of view. I hope adobe's influence on magento is not of the level as the '**bleep**ty' flash programming. Needless to say, having such code in widely used webshops is going to be disastrous.
Please read and express your concerns to fix this here, because it looks like this is trying to be ignored:
https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/32150#issuecomment-835346718
https://community.magento.com/t5/Installing-Magento-2-x/Is-it-possible-to-use-wget-instead-of-php-in...
https://community.magento.com/t5/Just-Ask-Alan/Is-it-possible-to-use-wget-instead-of-php-in-cron-for...
