It always blows my mind to think that the light you see now left those stars before dinosaurs walked this planet. And those photons spent millions and millions of years traveling through space, all to hit the back of your eyeball and tell your brain there is a star there. And that light is like a time-traveler telling you that star existed millions of years ago - it may have died out a long time ago.
Discussion
It’s about a century for 100 light years. So we’re maybe a millennium or more behind for relatively close stars and some even just a decade. But yeah, we wouldn’t know it today if they are still there.