Foolish, overconfident, or just "never have had $3000 in one place and time in my entire life."
For most people, if you pull them into the spot light, you will quickly shut them up. That does not make their legal threats baseless.
I think the core issue here is not being able to distinguish the two cases easily.
Personally I've told some expensive solicitors to get lost successfully, and for some I've engaged my own & spent tens of thousands. I suppose I tended to be aware of legal risks that I was running in my old business.
But lawyers are trying to get a result for their client as fast as possible. So if they've sent you something full of hand-waving jargon, they're either not very good at communicating (& not the kind of lawyer used to taking things further) or they're trying to intimidate because they've not got anything substantial to say.
Also (in my xp) it's rare that a lawyer won't clarify something they've written unless they're being paid to intimidate, and (in the UK at least) a judge will have short shrift with a plaintiff if pre-trial communications were insubstantial and intimidatory. You can't just be summoned to court with no idea what you did wrong.
a particularly foolish or over-confident defendent might represent themselves, but otherwise, I would not budget less than $2000-3000 to hire a lawyer to draft and file a response to statement of claim and show up in court to attempt to get it dismissed before it gets started.