> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Oh, I wish...

We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...

Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.

Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.

Perhaps 'Error' in tasteful smoked glass overlay, but with a QR code that encodes an error number?

(Spent some time last year supporting students online - noone was going to take a screen shot of their laptop so we ended up with them emailing photos off their phones)