I blame the combination of how over-hyped the (real) issue of Y2K was combined with how successfully we handled it (partly because everyone was so worked up about it) leading to the (common issue for IT professionals) take away of "well nothing went wrong, why did we put all that effort into trying to stop something going wrong?" for no small part of why people weren't as willing to try to stop/minimise Covid as they otherwise might have been (of course it was always going to be a harder sell as Y2K mostly required from the general public that they don't have a tantrum about organisations paying professionals to fix the problem directly whereas Covid required the general public to follow the advice of the professionals in taking action in their own lives.)