The forward facing cameras can (do, in fact) alarm pax in a strong crosswind, and even moreso in very gusty conditions, as, in the first case, they can't see the runway until very late on finals if the pilot is laying off for drift, and when it's gusty, the pic jumps around quite alarmingly.
The company I work for have suggested to crews that it might be a good idea to have the purser turn the camera display in the cabin off in such conditions.
Re "shock! horror!, we were all gonna die!" pax accounts: it's a sad fact of life that editors scrap the boring, factual accounts given to them by their reporters and print or put to screen the more outrageous ones we all so hate to read. It's because they sell newspapers or bring in the viewers.
Not in any way suggesting that the Thai crew did anything short of a totally professional job in this case, (let's wait for the official report), but incidents like this, proving that the elements, the weather, or Mother Nature - whatever you want to call the environment we operate in daily - can still bite make me wonder about reports we've read only in the last few days that some airlines are suggesting a lessening of training requirements to meet the looming pilot shortage. Sometimes, (and 34 at MEL with a raging northerly and that damned windshear-inducing gully on short finals is a good example), it's necessary to be able to plonk your megajet onto the bitumen the old fashioned way without all the automatics doing most of it for you.