That makes sense. But maybe there is something else... Hollywood exaggerated what could be done too soon.

Take the classic 1995 films The Net and Hackers. (I love hackers now in a bittersweet way because of just how sincerely positive they felt towards the future and the future of the internet. Genuinely believing that it will forever be a place of a freedom and ruled by wild west cowboy hackers who will not only do things out of curiosity, but also never sell out. To be fair, they were going by The Hacker Manifesto ).

In The Net, you have a terminally online cybersec specialist (a female cybersec specialist, and terminally online... in the mid-90s. The former is believable, the latter is not... there just wasn't THAT much to do online at the time) who gets her life torn apart when people erase her very existence using the internet. They state that 'everything is online now' meaning everything can be accessed and destroyed, thus rendering her a non-person with no records of who she because they purged all databases of her records.

In Hackers, you have somewhat the same thing play out... but it was done as a gag and clearly undone later. There is a US Secret Service agent causing the protagonists some trouble, so they make trouble for him by creating online dating profiles with his name and contacts (and putting extreme fetishes he does not have, thus having him be called by all manner of weirdos), cancelling his credit cards, and the funniest part: They have him declared legally dead somehow. All of this is undone of course, and the whole sequence played for laughs, but it greatly exaggerated what was and what wasn't online at the time.

One thing that absolutely COULD have happened that I didn't think was possible was in the 4th Die Hard movie, Live Free or Die Hard... in the movie the bad guys hack a city's traffic lights and make them all green all the time, thus causing numerous traffic accidents. I rolled my eyes when I saw and said 'nah, that can't happen'... only for me to read later that not only could such a thing happen, but it could happen in the stupidest way possible. Some hacker managed to find a clear-net website of some town that had their traffic light control on... and it was 100% unsecure. Meaning anyone with the URL could have just gone on and caused a lot of damage. The person who discovered it, thankfully, did not. But the fact that it COULD have happened was astonishing to me.

Now you have so much shit going on it isn't funny. I can't keep track of all the major hacks that just keep happening. From the Tea hack, to Las Vegas being compromised, to all sorts o shit. It is just incredible.