It didn't help that the media was hysterical claiming planes would fall out of the sky and nuclear reactors everywhere would melt down etc.
It's important to realise an averted disaster was still a potential disaster before it happened.
If anything this problem really put technical debt on the map. Which is a problem in more than just date formats.
I don’t know about direct lives saved but I have 2nd hand knowledge (I didn’t become a programmer until a few years after Y2K) of systems which if they did break down would have cost lives because people would have not had access to desperately needed money and it was statistically likely that at least a few of them would have died through suicide if not due to the issues created by the lack of money.
Where were the interviews with Cobol nerds standing in front of huge tape drives, sweating even in the chilly server room air as they mumbled inscrutable things?
The folks who fixed Y2K bugs were not the fad-driven, easy-money-chasing web weenies of the dot com boom. They were folks who worked on computers because they actually liked it.
Those didn't sell to the general public nearly as well as "oh my god we are all going to die", which seems to sell gangbusters to the same-ish cohort every ten years.
That sounds completely out of character for our media corporations! /s