Note I did not say there is no reason to be concerned about Meltdown and Spectre... just that for most users, uses, and systems, it's not that important. In the next three-to-six months, if you care about security at all, unless you are already running a tip-top tight operation, your money and effort is better spent defending against the many already-realistic threats, rather than worrying about the vector that may someday be converted into a realistic threat. Meltdown isn't what is going to drag your business to a halt next week; it's that ransomware that one of your less-savvy employees opened while mapped to the unbacked-up world-writable corporate share that has all the spreadsheets your business runs on. At the moment, the net risk of applying the Meltdown fix comfortably exceeds by several orders of magnitude the risk that Meltdown itself poses.

And my point is precisely that for most users and uses, that panic was not justified. Those for whom that is not true (VM hosting companies) already know they need to be more aggressive. There was no point in pushing out patches that nearly bricked some computers.