Similar with Y2K — it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, “yeah lol it was a dud.”

The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.

2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet

AfaIk that’s not entirely true, e.g. Debian is changing the system time from 32 bit integer to 64 bit. Thus I assume other distros do this as well. However, this does not help for IOT devices running deprecated Linux distributions.

industrial or IOT devices running deprecated Unix / Linux derivatives

This is my concern, all the embedded devices happily running in underground systems like pipes and cables. I assume there are at least a few which nobody even considered patching because they’ve “just worked” for decades!

Or like… PLANES! Some planes still update their firmware using floppy disks