I was fixing Y2K bugs at a company founded in 1997. Unless you never touched date stuff, I can't imagine being oblivious to Y2K issues working in IT in 1999.
The startups I worked in around that time - we were using recent hardware with 4 digit years and unconcerned about Y2K issues.
So while we were -aware- of the Y2K issue, it didn't impact any of us in a concrete fashion. We would talk about people we knew on Y2K projects, which were mostly mission critical legacy systems.
So it's not inconceivable for devs in the 90s to have only cursory awareness of the -real- issues that the people who worked on Y2K projects were facing and solved.
