If this wasn't exaggeration, we should study the fortunate circumstances by which this calamity has been avoided for 17 years.
The hunting and taxidermy of corrupted BGP advertisements is basically what got the NANOG crowd out of bed every morning; it's a pretty big chunk of the job. I always felt like the alarmism over BGP was a bit tone-deaf. Certainly, nothing Peiter said came as any surprise to anyone who'd ever managed default-free peering.
Imagine someone using all of the advanced techniques from today (DNS cache poisoning, DNS/NTP amplification attacks, BGP hacking, SQL injection, and so on and so on) and taking them back to 17 years ago when the world was naive and unsecure.
Also, we've had calamities, we just got over them. Code Red and then NIMDA caused huge disruptions, so did sasser and SQL Slammer. And we've gotten used to a world where people will use DDoS to try to take down sites or services for a variety of reasons ranging from profit to spite to boredom.
No, the internet never completely fell over and was unusable for days or weeks at a time, but a lot of people have been affected and it's just sort of become background noise in our lives the way tuberculosis and smallpox used to be.
So I wouldn't say that it's been entirely avoided.
Or, alternatively, you could go after some smaller internet companies, demand extortion money, buy a nice car and treat your friends to drinks.
Leaving aside the truth of their claims at the time–because it's irrelevant–your comment makes the fatal error of assuming conditions haven't changed at all in 17 years.