alt Hacker Newsmy first thought too. I've met a few people who assert that Y2K was a complete waste of money.
I earned my first house deposit helping the team fixing the water and gas company in Wales, UK. Their entire system was running off a set of COBOL programs on a mainframe, none of which had been properly documented over the years, and the whole thing used 2-digit dates. It would have caused actual deaths if not fixed; everything would have shut down, and no water and no heating in a British winter is potentially lethal. And then it would have sent everyone in Wales a bill for 100 years of water and gas.
They were bribing retired software devs to come out of retirement with huge stacks of money, because that was cheaper than training new COBOL devs and getting them familiar with the spaghetti system.
It worked, no-one died, life went on. So obviously it was all fake rolls eyes
I'm curious why things would have shut down when the system thought it was 1900. What part of the logic had the effect of "shut the system down if current date is less than (X date)?" (If you can remember the code 25+ years later, that is).