I'd like to talk about how we patch this pervading cynicism and replace it with a model that's actually useful.

It isn't true on face value. Consider the course of the Cov19 pandemic. Two things spread. One was a virus. The other was an idea, news about a virus. The latter spread much faster than the former. It spread because people love "doom". Any story about the impending "end of everything" is lapped up, relished and shared by the public.

There are well understood stages to information propagation. After "Is this real?" and "Am I affected?" comes the question of "what to do?"

I think this is where your assertion about "care" comes in. Some events will blow-up and burn out fast. People run around like headless chickens enjoying the drama about something remote to their lives, but ultimately nobody can do anything, so focus recedes. Wars and famines are like that. Curtis calls this "Oh Dearism".

Alternatively, if there is any residual effect, new events connected to the initial story, it feeds and grows. The initial "All the chips are broken!" story that would die after a 24 hour news cycle becomes an ongoing "situation". Then people care, because it's cool to care. It gets a catchy handle "Evil-Inside" and a news slogan "The chips are down". And then it won't go back in the bottle.

To reformulate your "Nobody cares" - as a question - "Do people have sensible cares that are proportionate to the threat?" No. But if the media tells them to care because cars are running off the road and there's a massive uptick in cybercrime, which nobody can ignore and is directly attributable to a single cause, then the "care" (hysteria) can get worse than the problem (which may have happened with Cov19 to some degree).

Finally, they may care, but about completely the wrong thing. One suspects, if it turns out there is indeed some serious drama in Intel chips, then Intel and the US government will try to paint the security researchers as irresponsible hackers who unleashed this upon the world.