> The design intent is still bad though: we should never have given CAs universal issuance privileges.

This is sort of right and sort of wrong. It's true that you could have a DNSSEC-style regime where only one entity could issue for a given domain, but as long as you're going to allow third party issuance at all, then you have to contend with the fact that most CAs want to issue in the big gTLDs (.com, .org, etc.) and so narrowing issuance doesn't help that much in many cases.

> 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.

This is ahistorical. By the time that DANE was designed, the WebPKI model was well entrenched and there was a huge population of browsers that couldn't really be upgraded and also only supported the WebPKI. If you wanted something that was acceptable to those browsers, it had to be WebPKI and it had to be cross-signed, hence Let's Encrypt.

I suppose you could argue that at some point after that one could have tried to deploy DANE and phase out LE and the rest of the WebPKI. I don't think that's true for the reasons that have been discussed on HN about DNSSEC, but that's really not the same as you wouldn't have needed LE in the first place.