Just imagine if no one had ever lifted a finger to fix any of the bugs. We only talk about it being a scam because everyone collectively did such a great job mitigating it in time.
Welcome to most enterprise IT shops.
e.g. "what do we pay all these janitors for when this place looks spotless?"
As for your examples, those are all boolean - they either do it successfully or they don't, and if they do, it's what they are paid for, and if they don't, they catch hell. There is nothing intrinsic about IT that differs.
People were talking about Y2K years ahead of time. Lots of changes to code were made. A few little bugs slipped through, but not many, and everyone knew how to fix them. No crisis. Without the many code changes, big problem.
In the end you end up in this perverse situation where you have to wait long enough for the public to understand what's at stake but not long enough that you won't be able to keep things under control. Quite the tightrope trick.