So, let me start by saying I work on the 'Spanish' flu within a specific context (Egypt), but they reported on a lot of the international press there since it was a British protectorate at the time.

I've never seen it reported that the flu was a hoax--in the sense that it didn't exist--but (also similar to current conditions) that it was being overblown and was "just the regular flu."

The influenza of 1918-20 was a mutated strain of H1N1, and it caused symptoms more commonly associated with pneumonia than with influenza, in particular the immuno-over response known as a cytokine storm, in which the lungs will with fluid and the victim essentially drowns. (This is also the prevailing fatal complication with COVID-19). The issue with the cytokine storm is that it's most likely to occur in people with strong immune systems, so the highest death rate worldwide was in people ages 20-30, in addition to the young and elderly. Again, this is unusual for influenza.

Skeptics tended to believe that people who were dying had either contracted secondary pneumonia, or had had pneumonia all along (and not the influenza), which contributed to the popular idea that the fatal illness was something "more" than influenza.

Also similar to today, I've read lots of columns written by doctors begging people to take the illness seriously and not to go out if they felt sick, etc. (In fact, living through COVID-19 has answered a lot of the questions I had about why people reacted--or didn't react--the way they did to the influenza).

Nursing Clio did a piece on the history of facemasks earlier this year. There were protests against facemasks in 1918. In San Francisco, there was a Anti-Mask league; in the US, there was also a push against spitting on the street (apparently this was socially acceptable at the time). In particular, men were resistant to wearing them because they seemed feminine; in other cases it was probably PTSD among veterans who'd served in the trenches and had to wear gas masks, and reacted strongly to having things on their faces.

So, the long in short of it is: yeah, people reacted about as well in 1918 as they did now. The medium through which the messages were spread may be different, and allow for easier dissemination of misinformation--but at heart people still had the same stubbornness and refusal to take the pandemic seriously, and to take action accordingly.