Maybe the "left behind" rhetoric stems from the underlying anxiety of this whole thing imploding and taking the economy with it.

I wish that were the case. Unfortunately I know plenty of people who truly believe that anyone that isn't using AI and paying hundreds of bucks for slop subscriptions will be so irrelevant in 2 months and will be begging for food and scraps on the streets and sleeping under bridges: even more fanatical then what we witnessed with Jobs and Musk. Arguably not the sharpest tools in the shed but looking at the news from every corner of the world, the shed is filled to the brim with very blunt tools.