Comment: I agree with you that there were many thousands (I would doubt millions) of unrecognized people around the world who worked very long hours behind the scenes to prevented a Y2K catastrophe. I also agree that the many people who have claimed that Y2K was not a real problem  that needed to be addressed are idiots.

However, the author didn't say that. 

What he said was simply that the recent prognostications regarding Brexit and Trump are "no worse than when .... the Y2K bug was expected to bring civilization to an ignominious end."  I would agree with him that the people who propagated the media panic which grew into a mythical scenario in which  it was expected that planes would  drop  from the sky and elevators would crash to the basements, and civilization would come to an end at midnight New Years Eve were equally idiots.