It wasn’t really a hoax. It was a legitimate problem. Lots of software could have broke. It didn’t because developers were diligent. There was a long leadtime to New Year’s with lots of people working overtime.

Depending on which Chromebook it is, you can always install the Linux container and install it in there

We have an Ubuntu machine at work with an NVIDIA GPU we use for CUDA. Every time CUDA has an update, CUDA throws obtuse errors until reboot.

To say only kernel updates require reboot is naive.