It’s not Kessler Syndrome until it’s so bad that we can’t feasibly launch anything new. A single cascading collision chain might calm down again after breaking a lot of stuff without any catastrophic long term impact if all the debris ends up either in a stable orbit that can be predicted and avoided by other objects, or unstable orbits that decay until the debris falls out of orbit.
Maybe XT-1 woke up with tattoos like this, but it said Dave the lab tech was here, and Dave was the only one to enjoy it.