I did 15-years of daily commute/transport in the Greater Orlando area---back before there were bike lanes.
I think the issue is plain bad driving.
There are a lot of low-income transients looking for work, driving crap cars, and not occasionally intoxicated to a mild degree (in my experience.) There are a lot of harried, selfish, unhappy, impatient commuters trapped in traffic on roads never designed to handle the volume of traffic they get. For many hours of the day, traffic is stop-and-go on Any major (more than two lanes) road going anywhere, the highway (I-4) included, and any "back roads" or "short cuts" have been so thoroughly explored that even those roads are choked with congestion.
It is easy to make bad decisions when half awake in the morning or half worn out in the evening, when hurrying to get home, get kids, run errands, and do it all again the next day.
Add to that the snowbirds (elderly people who come down just for the winter---which is also school season.)
Driving standards aren't as low as say, in Beijing, but traffic laws (and the laws of physics)a re often treated as suggestions, or nuisances---or forgotten entirely.
While the people who aggressively didn't like cyclists were more outspoken (throwing stuff or vehicles squeezing cyclists off the road were more common) I don't think people were freaked out by cyclists---they just saw cyclists as further impediments to getting wherever they needed to be, and since bikes can scratch paint but not do significant body damage tot eh car, it was more acceptable (to the drivers) to risk hitting a bike---besides, as every driver knows, bikes have to pull over or stop for cars ... right?
Not sure if drivers have become unused to cyclists in the time since i left the area.