For reference, I wasn't able to access any of the affected sites until around 5pm on the day of the attack, and I don't even live in a big city, though I do live on the east coast.

If you look at HN comments from posts about the attack while it was ongoing you can see plenty of people who were also affected by the attack (for example, people looking for name servers that cached longer than allowed, or opendns' smartcache). I understand why you think "the media" sensationalizes things, but in fact it is absolutely not complicit in saying things that are not true, even for the sake of embellishment (i.e. look at what happened to Brian Williams).

It's not bullshit though, the threat is real and something needs to be incited amongst the public in order for action to be taken. It's not really about what happened on Friday, it's about the implications that came with it. With the projected growth of IoT and if the hardware used continues to be unregulated we will eventually see a distributed attack on an unimaginable scale that WILL be very damaging. This is one of many major security threats that we are facing currently in the modern world.

It is acceptable and logical for someone to not be directly or indirectly affected by an incident, yet it still is not bullshit.

Suppose Mars gets destroyed by an unseen cosmic event. Are Earthlings inciting bullshit to go "oh shit, this could happen to us?"

You sound like a certain presidential candidate. When things don't make sense to you, just blame the media.