$10 000 has always been a very important psychological barrier, and before that the same thing happened with $1000. People are always weak at such numbers, and that will never change. If you ask people what interests them most at the moment, I believe many would ask the question "When BTC $100k"?
You're right, people say these things, but if 1000 was a real barrier then why didn't we stop at that in 2013. The top on bitstamp was 1163. Then again when we revisited this level in 2017 we didn't stop at 1000 buy 1139, so each time we went 10% above. People like to talk big like 100thousand dollar bitcoin, but when push comes to shove we will either stop far below it or overshoot.
There is definitely truth in what you wrote, because such a big correction would mean that something terrible happened, maybe not exclusively related to Bitcoin, but something like declaring a world pandemic. I agree that there is too much money in the game right now, and that it is definitely not as easy to manipulate the market as it used to be.
We've seen what pandemic news can do to price in 2020, so sure, such events can make us go below expected levels but these drops should theoretically be short-lived.