Your analogy misrepresents the grandfather's point. A closer analogy for his argument might be:

- Some high number X of dark alley stabbings occur each year.

- But alleys still "feel" safe to people, because the stabbings aren't well-publicized. So people don't know to avoid them and the rate X remains the same.

- Let's publicize alley stabbings in an emotionally impactful way, so people know to avoid alleys and we can bring X down.

In the actual case at hand, the argument is that you break a few eggs so people understand the issue viscerally, and hope to achieve massive regulatory change because people now actually care. I don't know if it would work, but it's a more reasonable idea than you're making it out to be.

Solving the root problem here is orders of magnitude more important than any single data breach today is.