It can be that but there is also denial, which is a slightly different mechanism. From Jared Diamond's "collapse":
"For example, consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that
if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a con-
siderable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people down-
stream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam's bursting, it's not
surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases
among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after
you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam's breaking
is found to be highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach
closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the
ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That's
because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity
while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could
burst. Although psychological denial is a phenomenon well established in
individual psychology, it seems likely to apply to group psychology as well."
In this specific example, it could be that people who chose to live under the dam were already unconcerned with the dam bursting. People who had concern have moved farther from the dam.
Yeah it could be.
Diamond doesn't seem to have given a citation, and unfortunately I haven't found his source, so not sure if there is evidence about that.
"Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
We saw this at the start of the pandemic too.