I think the belief that Skynet was about to be activated arose from having faith in the imminent arrival of functional autononmous cars, which we can blame on lies from Musk and Waymo (Waymo stopped lying at some point, but they did for awhile).
As is usually the case with technological developments that are "almost" here, this was used to hijack useful conversations about actual current problems.
Automation has long been with us and has long been displacing jobs, so this conversation was about a singularity type event, after which AI would be here and would do EVERYTHING (except hot takes).
These look neato, but like self-driving cars are probably just... neato. The issue is not whether robots can lift boxes. Of course they can! The issue is whether they can handle complex environments, not just pulling uniform boxes off an assembly line or similar, something they've managed for decades.