Meltdown/Spectre was not a "fiasco" due to Microsoft and Intel not finding out. It was "responsibly" disclosed to the companies, and there were multiple months

Meltdown/Spectre was not a "fiasco" due to Microsoft and Intel not finding out. It was "responsibly" disclosed to the companies, and there were multiple months to prepare a response. A bigger bounty would not change anything for Meltdown/Spectre. It was a "fiasco" because it affected over 90% of all servers and laptops out there. And there was just no way to prepare enough of a response, while keeping it secret. For a few months, too few engineers knew about it for good mitigation development. Towards the end, as more people who needed to know were looped in, everyone could see it coming. The vulnerabilities, and mitigations, were just too big.