Perhaps I'm not predisposed to view this story the way you are, but I actually got the opposite sense from it.

Don't trust that the massive bureaucracies will save you. Don't trust that the US government is doing a good enough job.

The brief mention in the story "there was a congressman demanding that even white-hat hackers, who tried to probe systems as a way to point out vulnerabilities before the bad guys got to them, be thrown in jail", I think screams that there are people working with our best interests at heart, don't demonize them as hackers.

But perhaps I'm just predisposed to optimism; that eventually the rational, sensible approach to cybersecurity will prevail.

Perhaps you're right, and I'm just being foolish.

I think the premise was totally reasonable because of the probabilities involved. Instead of a single hack resulting in a smoking crater, I think it's far more likely that the enemy will quietly amass a large library of exploits over a period of years, and then unleash them all at once to impede emergency service response, leverage panic, comm failures. This also means that instead of a 100pct success on one essential target like a nuclear plant, the enemy can work with thousands of 10pct successes against softer targets like EMS, power, transport, economy, etc.

So, you're saying you completely trust the people that make and manage our infrastructure? Hell, all half of this takes is a group of hackers discovering the next SuperFish before the good guys and pre-emptively selling a persistant presence on high valued targets computers. Or some router serious with yet another backdoor or cameras that dont remove the previously registered owner or any number of awful, awfully made security products.

And this doesn't even paint any government organization in a competent light!

Not really. You could probably crash a truck into any of a few weak bridges and create a lot of havoc.