Yes. I am criticizing the de facto web PKI, not the somewhat better design intent. The design intent is still bad though: we should never have given CAs universal issuance privileges.
The web has continued to go the wrong way in practice. (For example, browser makers rejected RFC9102 DNSSEC stapling, which could have enabled an incremental migration away from CA-centric hell.) Everything fix the existing web PKI community makes just seems to centralize trust more.
For example, Let's Encrypt has been useful for moving people off unencrypted services, but side it's now ubiquitous on the internet and had to work within the broken universal-grant CA model, it now represents a terrifying central point of failure. Had browser makers supported DANE instead, and had we embraced DNSSEC instead of casting aspersions on it, we wouldn't have needed Let's Encrypt because ownership of a domain name would have already, by that very fact, let you authenticate to anyone.
The web has continued to go the wrong way in practice. (For example, browser makers rejected RFC9102 DNSSEC stapling, which could have enabled an incremental migration away from CA-centric hell.) Everything fix the existing web PKI community makes just seems to centralize trust more.
For example, Let's Encrypt has been useful for moving people off unencrypted services, but side it's now ubiquitous on the internet and had to work within the broken universal-grant CA model, it now represents a terrifying central point of failure. Had browser makers supported DANE instead, and had we embraced DNSSEC instead of casting aspersions on it, we wouldn't have needed Let's Encrypt because ownership of a domain name would have already, by that very fact, let you authenticate to anyone.