A friend of mine was telling me how he spun up a consultancy and made enough to retire off the back of Y2K. Must be time to spin up one for Y2K38 and make bank again.
I was young at the time, and I did what management told me to do but felt icky about it because I knew it was hugely inferior and they didn't know what they were doing, and I was just a tiny cog in the team doing all the changes, most of which thought it was fine... Left that place long ago.
What you recommend is an easy fix, and might work most of the time, but its wrong and will cause infuriating problems, probably making others suffer your past deeds. Just do it properly once, first time.
Companies/Tools/Projects that plan to exist beyond 2038 should just migrate their code.
LGR did an excellent video [1] on the subject.
My guess is that there would have been some minor disturbances; bureaucratic snafus about life insurance and so on. But unlikely to be a collapse of society.
I think it's so you can monitor the fuel level from inside your RV or something.