I'm not sure you can infer that because the worst predictions of alarmists didn't immediately happen, there is no danger in not having network neutrality.

Assuming an ulterior motive is unnecessary, the stated motive seems good enough, they don't want a network to freeze out their services in order to promote their own.

Therr was a massive astro turf campaign on reddit regarding NN. Of course there is some motive behind it when money is being spent to lobby it.

I even read something about how "people will literally die without NN". That kind of rhetoric should be a signal.

From what I remember, the crux of the matter was that the change of regulation would give more negotiating power to ISPs when it came to common infrastructures they shared with large cloud providers (Google and co).

The status quo was highly advantageous to said cloud providers, which is why they lobbied so hard against net neutrality changes. And since people on the internet get really vocal about perceived threats to the internet, the lobbying went viral.