It's 15 years later, and I don't recall the details, but I'm pretty sure that at least one of the big players went down in a way that the stockholders got zero.
Yes, the banks that outright failed. But e.g. Bear Stearns got a bit of a sweetheart deal.
Shares of those banks play a much larger role in index funds, retirement accounts, etc than First Republic or SVB. The major banks are so tightly coupled that if one fell most of the others would have, and the very debt that created our currency in the first place would have disappeared.
Whether bailing out the banks in 2008 was a net positive won't be known for a while. We're still dealing with the blowback from 2008 and we can't know whether the bailouts saved us from further pain or pushed it under the rug and made the pain worse later.
One huge, positive difference between 2008 and now: owners aren’t being bailed out. Stock and bondholders in 2008 got rescued. Not this time.
In February, First Republic had a $40bn enterprise value [1]. That is largely, if not entirely, gone. (JPMorgan acquired “substantially all of the assets of First Republic Bank,” so there will still be scraps to fight over.)
[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/FRC/enterprise_value