A recent similar example was the Indian move in 2016 to demonetize the ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes with very little notice, which is in retrospect widely viewed to have been a disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...
But it turns out that tons of people in rural India had their life savings under mattresses in large denomination bills...
History books on 1945 aggressive monetary policy change: "The public didn't like it"
History books on 2025 aggressive monetary policy change: "The public went frigging bananas, doxxed their leaders, coordinated widespread disobediance on the scale of GME, etc"
(Granted I live in the US, and that's putting it mildly how the US would react)
I have to wonder if there was a unspoken real reason they did it, because it was obvious anybody with lots of demonitized bills would farm out the redemption if necessary, and wikipedia reports 99.3% of notes were redeemed. Maybe the 0.7% was (some of) the black money that was targetted, or maybe that's a normal amount of lost and damage beyond redemption.
Otoh, maybe there was some highly classified but credible advance notice that the crimimal underground was about to start printing credible 500 INR notes en masse.