Sure, but you could say the same thing about any significant public infrastructure.
Replace "the DNS" with "sewage", "electrical grid", "produce supply chain", "postal mail", "housing swans during the winter", "flood management", etc in the above sentence and it still holds true.
Such underlying systems are generally ignored by the public until something goes catastrophically wrong, which is why "US air traffic control" wouldn't apply in this context anymore.
I challenge the assertion that most people *need* to be educated in the DNS, anymore than they need to be educated on how water comes to their home -- clean and in sufficient pressure to come out the tap. Generally speaking, the public just trusts that enough expertise exists in these fields to keep all this infrastructure working well enough that it *doesn't* need to be thought about. And if such expertise occasionally takes the form of "ivory tower conversations held in rarified air", the public generally doesn't care so long as the result works well enough to remain invisible.