Sounds a lot like "yeah sure, fear over 737 Max is overblown, but the fact that I was thinking about it in the first place says something about the current state of affairs".

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

It sounds nothing like that. Boeing is going to lose deals because carriers don't want to deal with repeated groundings. The US economy will reflect that.

People are concerned because it seems irrefutable that there is corruption and a culture of cost cutting causing these issues.

Incompetence is understandable, improperly modeling the physics due to lack of experience or knowledge is understandable, but repeated instances that point to corruption at the government regulator and bad culture at the manufacturer lend to fears that the situation will get worse for a while before it gets better.

It’s the same reason you might avoid flying on an Eastern European/Russian airplane. The perceived risks move from unforeseeable error or bad luck to systemic error.