To know if it was over-hyped and fear mongered we'd need to know how many people would have gotten the virus and died if we hadn't hyped it and gotten people scared.
So please, provide us a reasonable model of both death rate and infection rate/spread in a modern, interconnected country with easy travel that did not hype this virus. Please. Really, because we don't have any models that are decently reliable for that.
Death rates were higher in countries that neared or surpassed their hospital capacity. Spread was higher in countries that were later to or didn't lock down.
It is reasonable to assume that more people would have died had the US just done nothing. There were also real economic and peoples life costs to how we handled (and are handling) the COVID outbreak. I'm actually of the opinion that we didn't handle it very well at all, so in theory we could be in agreement. I also believe that some of the major talking heads went beyond the pale in exaggerations ignoring evidence that didn't align with their political views. So we could agree there as well. But just as many people have ignored evidence to be more fearful than warranted I've seen at least an equal number ignore evidence and first hand accounts so they could continue to believe that COVID-19 is a moderate severe flu, which it's clearly not.
You have, several time in this thread, made a sweeping assertion with, at best, no evidence to support it, and sometime in the face of the evidence provided. If you'll excuse my bluntness that's a remarkable ignorant argument from someone that normally posts cogent, well thought out posts.
No one will ever be able to prove the negative (what would have happened in the US if nothing was done), and it's an observable fact that the virus and our response to it has been politicized by our chattering class, but to go from there to "insignificant event" without some kind of decent evidence is a bridge to far.