Prediction: in a few years, we will laugh at this hysteria and call it a moral panic.
Exactly.
But in any reasonable definition they are all part of the same system, so it really is just noise, what seems like a tautology to you because you can't step out of the system. In your claim you have to assume that the force behind the panic wasn't the same force that created those issues. Why did this force create those issues, how did they become issues? Because someone randomly decided to optimize for a single goal. Y2K and ozone only became issues when they affected that single goal, functionally that force was amoral or singularly moral. The tautology can be reframed as: An adaptive system responds to threats to it's continued functioning.
People will laugh about it since the system wormed it's way into many people's head using various rewards (ideological, social, tangible). What concern me is that the system now gives us the language to describe it at the meta level, which means it's already a level higher. So likely there either doesn't exist human comprehensible language that can actually critique the system or the system has already moved everyone far away from the space that would lead to generation of that vocabulary. Best case scenerio it's just exceedingly confident in it's rewards (typical indoctrination/assimilation) but I think it's reasonable at this point to assume we are in the pessimistic "epistemic tarpit" scenario.
It's a bit like nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons were not a concern for most people until they were developed, tested, and used. But the people working on them were worried. Was it hysteria and moral panic to start worrying about them once people learned that they existed and how destructive they were? I don't think so. Do you look back at people during the cold war and laugh about their hysteria? I don't.
But at least with Y2K some effort was made in identifying actual problems. We didn’t just stop using computers because we were too scared of them. This latest round of AI panic is horribly vague and the problems are very poorly articulated.