No, it's hysteria. This is common practice on non-load-bearing access panels. I've seen many times on in-service commercial aircraft.
Who has done that? One plane lost a plug, with no injuries. Who else has gotten even injured in a commercial US flight in the last year?
Some of them matter, and the pilots keep a close eye on those during the preflight checks. Others, matter less so. (A single missing screw on a prop spinner - big problem. A missing screw on a non-structural plastic aerodynamic fairing - okay to defer, literally zero risk.)
There's an engineered threshold at which an aircraft is deemed not airworthy. On airliners, this is managed through a Minimum Equipment List (MEL), which is a formal checklist that tells the crew which equipment is allowed to be broken (and for how long).
This threshold is less than 100% by design, because little things break all the time. It can take days/weeks in the shop to fix issues, so you need to batch up all the maintenance. (Can you imagine if you had to take every aircraft offline for several days after every flight?) And that's okay, because there's still a large safety margin built in as long as the MEL is followed.
That's exactly what the air force does. Most of their jets require tens of hours of maintenance for every flight hour!