Because it was an issue, there were patches and now those CPUs are old AF by todays standards.

Were we just supposed to talk about it forever?

After those have been exposed, web browsers (chrome, chromium..) have been patched multiple times and since then we have situation, that few open tabs in web browser eats up all memory.
That's indirect result of those vulnerabilities.
Before you were able to open many tabs with much less RAM used.

The vulnerabilities were addressed.

For already released chips, they received mitigations in the form of firmware (which reduced their performance).

Later chips were designed to not be vulnerable.

So what else was supposed to be done? Talk about it forever? There was no need to, but similar examples have continued to happen (I don't have links to articles offhand, but 2023 and 2024 had a fair bit of coverage of high security hardware and driver issues that were addressed between AMD, Intel, and nVidia). Going the other direction, Spectre and Meltdown weren't the first examples of hardware vulnerabilities. They were just two that got a lot of attention.

Not 100 percent mitigation in other words only some is fixed

引用自 Numlock587：

Not 100 percent mitigation in other words only some is fixed

*citation needed.