> So why was everyone so scared?

I think this section misses the mark.

The biggest problem is that for a good 12 hours nobody knew what was going on. All we knew was there is a critical vulnerability affecting all of us that allows RCE somehow and we have to have vulnerable servers open for potentially even longer.

Everyone who knew was being hush hush, only chiming in to say "nah, those workarounds don't work, you're fucked".

So when people started spreading rumors of PoC or when the Cloud flare CTO posted that they were actively seeing exploit traffic - what are we supposed to do?

We aren't sitting there trying to PoC with Claude - we're subscribing to a bunch of news feeds and twitter accounts while we try to prepare for the patch and close down what we can. We're calling executives saying "hey, how much money do we lose by being offline for 6 hours?"

So even if this isn't as easily exploitable as first believed, no one could have known that, because those with the ability to calm us down were seemingly choosing to stoke the fires.

This is (IMO) a failure of the potentially outdated disclosure system that's supposed to protect us. And at the very least a trial run of how the world may react next time, if it really is that bad.