It's a pain for sure, but you really need to take this seriously. What it boils down to is you basically have a hand grenade in your steering wheel (and passenger dash if also airbag equipped there). So if you get into an accident such that the airbag is commanded to deploy, you could have shards of metal coming at your head along with an airbag.
The underlying issue is with the mechanism that inflates the airbag. It has an explosive charge behind a metal ring holding the deflated airbag, and when commanded to deploy and inflate, the charge actually explodes to start the whole process. That explosion has enough force to fracture the metal ring, if it's been weakened by moisture and such, and spray those metal shards out into the passenger compartment.
And just to be clear, this is not theoretical. There have been 2 cases here in Texas that I know of where older cars with these airbags were involved in minor traffic accidents and their drivers were killed by the shrapnel coming out of the airbag deployment. Both vehicles were under active recall for their airbags, but evidently they had been purchased used and the recall notices were not sent to the new owners. Consequently, neither car had had the airbags replaced yet.