The solution to the year 2038 problem is to upgrade your time since the Unix epoch fields to 64 bit integers. Hopefully this won't be an actual issue 14 years from now because it's such a simple fix.
About a decade ago I was involved in the development of an embedded product for industrial use cases. The kind of stuff you install once and use for 20-40 years. The library we used for displaying the time breaks around 2036 (so a bit ahead of y2k38). But the person responsible would long be in retirement by then and the issue doesn't impact critical functions, so it was decided not to do anything about it. This version of the product is still sold today. I doubt this story is uncommon.
The media wasn't telling us that the problems were getting fixed though. It kept on hyping the doomsday in whatever way it could. We were supposed to wake up in 2000 to find our fridge door open and melted ice all over the floor. Why? Fridges didn't have clocks that told them to turn themselves off, or clocks at all.
That anybody believed the media's claim that refrigerators had computers in them in the 1990s seems like a case of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect[0]. Smart refrigerators didn't even exist until LG released one in June 2000 that was a commercial failure[1].
I remember the news telling us that all sorts of unexpected devices had computers in them these days and computer=Y2K bug risk. Microwaves certainly did so fridges would be an easy leap to make.