I'm published in the field of solar physics, though I dropped out of getting a PhD. I specialized in space weather modeling, and the solar wind specifically, and studied a lot of larger flares that were Earth directed. I also dealt with the effects of strong solar activity on the spacecraft we used for our measurements (noise, downtime, etc...) so I am kind of familiar with the subject :)
A significant carrington event, in my opinion, would cause some surprising electronic failures, but not likely widespread ones.
The basis for my assumption (and that's all it is) is that previous failures of electronic systems because of solar flares have happened only on large scale electronics systems (power grids) and those systems were older, less shielded, and had bad tolerances.
Modern electronics, at least the bulk that are in daily use are much more shielded, higher quality, and resilient enough to not bring down civilization.
I'd expect it to be something more similar Y2K - definitely hit a few people, cost some money here and there, but literally everyone on the planet heard about it nonstop for quite some time because it might have been bad.
So, I think the tension around this is that, maybe depending on how astronomically large the event is, sure, it could be bad, like, if it stripped away our magnetosphere permanently somehow, yep, that'd suck and probably be a problem for humanity, but I find it to be on the unlikely end of things.
So folks aren't crazy for thinking it might cause some trouble, maybe even widespread, maybe even apocalyptic, but I think it's much more likely it will be an annoying and costly blip for most involved.
As an aside, I bet you'd be surprised with how often modern hardware has bit flips in memory because of cosmic rays alone, and we're mostly OK with that.