The issue was the suddenness, yes. It would have gone more smoothly had we reacted in time.

For Americas concern, we probably never should have gotten Russian gas to begin with, there really wasn’t any change to that ever. But this only happened when finally everyone in Europe also got the message, that despite the cheap rates it still wasn’t worth it.

Had we started earlier, we probably could have worked out some agreement, played ball with Putin, and gotten a supply to allow a slow and efficient phase-out.
In 2022 thought, Russia was already pressuring nations with the pipeline. Pipelines in eastern Europe had been dry for months, with Russia trying to instead pressure the opening of nordstream 2. Likely for the same reason, nordstream 1 had also been running slower and slower for a while, with Gasprom making dobious claims of technical issues. The implied political message there was gas would resume only if nordstream 2 went live or sanctions were reduced. nordstream was completely offline for a month before the detonation.

Basically the only way any gas would have ever made it through nordstream at that point was if Russia had gained some political concessions. I am glad this did not happen, and the detonation basically just took one fear off of me at the time, since then we no longer had to ignore this pressure, but knew for certain we could no longer cave, and the only way forward was to bite the bullet and move on to other sources, with all the associated costs.

There are for sure attempts to propagandize the EU population. Recently I have noticed short form video being weaponized for this for example. The YouTube recommendation algorithm has also seemed suspicious since some time last year, in pushing a lot of videos in the span from US state aligned news to Maga-aligned conspiracy theorists.

We’ll see how effective that is in the longer run, but I don’t think a year or two of just that is sufficient, especially when there are still somewhat functional local news, covid is over and people talk a bit more again, and there is awareness of the US doing precisely this sort of influencing.

PS:
It’s not as simple as building solar and wind to replace gas. That would be way too naive.
The issue is the function gas has in the grid. The EU only had like 20% contribution of gas to the grid before 2022. Simply using the reserve capacity and reigning in the biggest wastes of power for a bit could have seen complete elimination of gas use within days if it was that easy.

Gas is used to buffer out the shorter-term fluctuations of renewables. If you take down gas, you also take down most green energy and with that like half the total capacity. Most fossil power-plants take a while to spin up. Nuclear takes even longer. Gas though can act within minutes or seconds, since it is burned in turbines.
To replace the position of gas in the grid, the most feasible move is to overbuild on renewables capacity, and then add some batteries. Renewables are insanely cheap, so it is worth it to build more panels than you could ever use at max capacity, just so it takes a bigger drop to eat into the batteries. Batteries then have to take up the remainder, and batteries are still not cheap, and were even worse in 2022. The knowhow was hardly even there in the EU.

Renewables have been greatly built up since 2022, providing this overcapacity, and thus reducing the gas needed to fill the gaps. And now in 2025 I finally saw significant construction of battery storage in the central EU.
All this needed knowhow, heaps of hardware, construction of tons of new infrastructure like entirely new hv lines to balance the changed flows of electricity, …