It seems that low quality batteries, may sometime experience breakdown.
This is due to the poor insulating structures between internal chemical poles.
Thus if a single battery starts discharging it may (hopefully) go without doing any harm.
However if you have several of them in parallel, all the healthy ones will suddenly start pushing energy into the collapsing battery which will be bearing all the load, possibly exploding or catching fire, which I fear the most.
This is a very common misconception, but very understandable because it seems to make sense.
But think about it further. If you need certain capacity, the options are:
* Build a larger cell
* Parallel cells
Now the single larger cell would have the same surface area and volume of raw materials as the sum of the paralleled cells, to achieve the same capacity. So the probability of the fault is exactly the same. And, different areas of the cell can still "push energy" into the internal short. So there is no difference.
Except that there is: the smaller the cell, the larger the numbers it's manufactured in. For example, 18650's are easily available from well known manufacturers. Larger format cells are trickier to manufacture and you have to resort to poor quality factories. A larger cell is way more likely to contain a defect, and for an iffy factory, letting that slip through QC is appealing. Having to discard 1% of failed 18650 cells won't totally kill your profit, but if you build 10x bigger cells, you would have to discard 10% of them.
Secondarily, a packaged cell usually has some safety layers beyond what's integrated into the electrodes and separators. For example, 18650 cells come with PTC (polyfuse) and CID (current interruption device, basically overpressure switch) integrated into the cell cap. If the safety mechanisms of the electrodes/separators fail, these cell package level mechanism can still prevent escalation of the issue. This would not work on a single larger cell.
So paralleled cells are likely safer. Li-ion cells are also designed and suppose to be paralleled from day one, so don't be afraid doing that (of course knowing how to do it right.)
But getting genuine cell from the big brand names is most important.