Agreed.
IMO, ‘One Second After’ was a brilliant ploy to strike fear into people and force them to grovel in the face of certain destruction if there’s an EMP. An entertaining and clever story, but I suspect things would be less severe over a shorter time span, limited to dense, urban areas full of ferals.
Those of us who had grandparents born in the 19th century, parents who survived the depression and who, ourselves, prep for various disasters or live in the sticks and experience power outages in bad weather would figure things out.
Even progs prep.
Agreed.