IPv6 solves this but people are still afraid of it for stupid reasons.

It's not hard, but it is a little bit different and there is a small learning curve to deploying it in non-trivial environments.

Another issue (also driving some of the opposition to v6) is the pervasive use of numerical IPs everywhere instead of setting up DNS proper.

I think this part is somewhat legitimate. Every network engineer knows "it's always DNS," to the point that there are jokes about it. DNS is a brittle and inflexible protocol that works well when it's working, but unfortunately network engineers are the ones who get called when it's not.

A superior alternative to DNS would help a lot, but getting adoption for something at that level of the stack would be very hard.

I find that a lot of "it's always DNS" falls down to "I don't know routing beyond default gateway" and "I never learnt how to run DNS". Might be a tad elitist of me, I guess, but solid DHCP, routing, and DNS setup makes for way more reliable network than anything else.

DNS just tends to be part that is visible to random desktop user when things fail

>Might be a tad elitist of me, I guess, but solid DHCP, routing, and DNS setup makes for way more reliable network than anything else.

Depends on the network. If you are talking about a branch office, for sure.

>I find that a lot of "it's always DNS" falls down to "I don't know routing beyond default gateway"

I see it mostly with assumptions. Like DNS Server B MUST SURELY be configured the same as DNS Server A, thus my change will have no unexpected consequences.

Solid management of the services is important, yes. Also being prepared for when requirements change. I remember to this day when a bunch of small (rack-scale) deployments suddenly needed heavy-grade DNS because one of the deployed projects would generate a ton of DNS traffic. My predecessor set up dnsmasq, I didn't have a reason to change it before that, afterwards we had to setup total of 6 DNS servers per rack (1 primary authoritative, 2 secondary updating themselves from authoritative, 3 recursive).

I would say situation also changes a lot if you know/can deploy anycast routes for core network services - for example fc00::10-12 will always be recursive nameservers, and you configure routing so that it picks up the closest one, etc.