So.. what has the effect of this all been? I understand that the early release of POC exploits increased the pressure for mitigations in advance of the patch release and caused a lot of work and stress. I have read the tweets from Cloudflare with statistics for malformed requests related to suspected exploit attempts.

I know breaches are often kept under wraps, and there's a long tail. But is there any evidence of impact at this point? Were any sites compromised that we know about? There was a lot of hullabaloo, with foreign and domestic LE agencies recommending sites be taken offline (holy shit!).

Was this like Y2K where, based on the coordinated action of many, a real issue was addressed in time? Or is it like Hale Bopp where everybody watched, and a few casualties in the preparation, but ultimately a nothingburger?

Flame on!