The Y2K effort was much more nuanced than this. I was there for it and it was more like highly targeted patching based on carefully crafted test sets and frameworks.

> army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time.

No way did all get rewritten. Where source was available, fixes were applied and systems retested.

True drama ensued for programs for which the source was no longer obtainable.

The company I was at during that time had programs that had been in production since at least 1960.

The other effort that took place was attending to the systems during the midnight boundary with everybody either in the office or on call.

The other strong observation was that the risks were very much not understood, with exaggerations both extreme and dismissive. Also not discussed in the popular press at the time was the extent that most of these systems were not truly totally automated.