You joke, but there are practical and historic reasons for the pessimism.

No one in the West has had the Eastern European experience of queuing for bread for hours and discovering there isn't any.

In the West we have exceptionally strong normalcy bias and can't imagine a world with severe scarcity.

In countries like Poland that's still lived memory.

That exact experience was my first day in Poland in the 80's. As a spoiled Western kid this was quite an eye opener. Lots of stuff I took for granted was reviewed in those years, and it affects me to this day.

Heck, 80 years ago it wasn't obvious there would still be a Poland. Absolutely understandable that pessimism is a normal state of mind.