memes

You're spot on. The vast majority of news coverage and "hype" from the general public relating to Y2K was all horse shit, but there were critical systems that did have issues and needed some work.

For the most part, the whole 19100 issue was a display bug, and likely wouldn't have caused problems, and the same for 1900... Those are examples that people generally saw at banks and whatnot, it would, for the most part, look weird, but for the most part, wouldn't create any actual problems. It would just be confusing for a while until the system caught up.

I think there's a few examples of companies missing the January 1st deadline and ending up with stuff marked as January 1900 for a bit. Otherwise they didn't have any significant issues.

Anything that involves a legally binding agreement would be critical though. Since the date is part of the agreement terms, it would need to be correct, and shown correctly.

Unless the "bug" literally crashed the system (which, it really should not have in most cases), like in your example, or it was connected to a legal contract, then it really wasn't that big of a problem.

The media, and people in general kept going on about it like they knew what the technical problem was, and it was always just conjecture and banter that made people worry unnecessarily.

What I'm trying to say is that Y2K was something that needed to be fixed but the likelihood that it would affect any singular person in society was very small. Those that were going to be affected, generally knew who they were and they were taking the steps required to fix the problem.