Why does it have to be traumatic? Maybe the development of mass media was traumatic, everyone putting near-complete trust in any video they see or piece of text they read was traumatic, and now we will see some of that trauma be undone.
Yes, it really was. Adolf Hitler, for one, found radio and cinema and he just used what was already there. Before his countrymen had developed the media chops to deal with his messaging.
Others' past failures are not an excuse for our future ones. Nor should we allow ourselves to blithely imagine that this time it'll be different. Without strong evidence to the contrary.
At the start of the pandemic, and in the middle and towards the end there were always voices arguing for "herd immunity now! Let the inevitable happen, as it must".
For me, those voices were too early, until other things had fallen into place. Then they were eventually right.