I was like that too. I never got stung by a wasp throughout my childhood. First and only time it happened to me was when I was on my way back from shopping in a retail park in Bracknell (a true natural wilderness) in my mid-twenties. Little fucker just landed on the back of my neck and stung me. Agony it was.
Mrs F disturbed a wasps’ nest in our garden a few years back and got stung above the eye. Her face swelled up like she’d done ten rounds with insert name of heavyweight champion of the world here. She needed drugs and stuff and it took days to go down.
So in short, wasp stings are just as painful as you think they might be, they can make you alarmingly unwell, so being scared of the little fuckers is definitely not irrational.
Especially if you’re a caterpillar.