I'm reminded of year 2000. Yes complete overreaction, but I'm also certain it would not have been such a non-event if it weren't for that extreme attention it got.
Most of the bad things predicted by the media wouldn't have happened even if no effort was spent. However there would have been a lot of things not predicted by the media that would have been bad. The bad things the media predicted were easy to put into a sentence, while the bad things that would have happened would take books to explain. They would only really be bad because of the sum total happening all at once.
Everyday people in the leadup to y2k assumed it meant that every computer would somehow explode. Almost nobody stopped to actually reason through the real life consequence of a program getting the date and time wrong.
You mean Y2K? Yeah I remember there was even a Simpson episode about it being absolute chaos (one of the Tree House Horror episodes). And then pretty much "nothing happened" (a few ATMs here and there spitting money randomly, a few funny incidents, but nothing of scale) and the world thought IT people had been paranoid over nothing.
Fast forward to 2020, we still have Feb 29 bugs around (I saw a few posted on twitter, none in person). The response back then was huge and adequate, but totally underappreciated as time went by.
One of the Feb 29 bugs I saw this year was that when I logged on to Skype for Business Monday March 2nd, everyone in my company that had logged off their computers on Friday Feb 28th, had a message about being offline for anywhere between 20-40 days. It just didn't know how to handle that day.