As someone who was forced to spend Y2K in a "prepped" cabin on the side of a mountain with two years of supplies buried underneath, I think you might overestimate the quality of the public's response to Y2K.

The public did not maturely understand that software needed to be updated and everything was OK.

There was some real panic out there. It was arguably the biggest "End Times" event of the modern era, definitely IMO surpassing "2012" and other "apocalypse panics".

The Y2k preppers and panic, I think, was the foundation for the modern prepper movement and the public's desire to flip from conspiracy to conspiracy to predict collapse.