What was worst case scenario if we hadn’t addressed Y2K?
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I am sure I lack imagination here. But you have no idea just how many banks were processing documents with two digit years for the transaction date field. It was not just between the banks but also between different departments, for the storage and archive, within different computer systems and even within each application. A failure in one of these systems would not be a big deal, part of a bank would be out of order. So no new loans, bank transfers, or brokering for a few days depending on what system was affected. They might have processed a lot of it manually or blindly just to get by. When the systems got up the stockpile of work would have been processed over the weekend and everything back to normal.
However if there had been multiple of these failures at once. Taking out several systems in the same bank. And this happening in every bank and financial institution. You would imagine that the financial world would just stop for a few days as the problems were fixed. However when you have an issue with a single system you can often commit more resources to fix it. All the developers at the bank start looking at the same problem. You get outside consultants or people from the vendor involved. Others in the bank would start working processing things manually or redirecting customers to other alternatives. But when you have multiple systems down you simply run out of resources to handle them all. Saying that a system will be up in a few days only works as long as you have people working on trying to fix it. If everyone is working on something else it would not get fixed. Adding to this when you have multiple systems down it is very hard to find the problem because there are so many places to look, and when you find something wrong you do not know if it is because of a problem in the software or if a related system is having problems. You even have a lot of systems not being used because of all the problems and they too might have similar issues.
So if people had not spent the better half of a decade trying to fix the Y2K bug in the financial systems the entire world financial market could have been down for months. And this would have stopped businesses from taking up loans, doing business transactions, etc. You would have people not working because they do not know what to work on or if they are going to get paid. It would result in a massive loss of income for lots of companies who would then end up bankrupt. It would be a massive financial crash.
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