We show that the sublinearly Morse directions in a visual boundary of a rank-1 \(\operatorname {CAT}(0)\) group are generic in several commonly studied senses of the word, namely with respect to Patterson-Sullivan measures and stationary measures for random walks. We deduce that the sublinearly Morse boundary is a model of the Poisson boundary for finitely supported random walks on groups acting geometrically on the associated rank-1 \(\operatorname {CAT}(0)\) spaces. We prove an analogous result for mapping class group actions on Teichmüller space. Our main technical tool is a criterion, valid in any unique geodesic metric space, that says that any geodesic ray with sufficiently many (in a statistical sense) strongly contracting segments is sublinearly contracting.