For the overwhelming majority of person-hours (or even Unix nerd person-hours) spent on the Internet we have had cryptographically secured remote shells.

Over all those hours, from the dawn of time until now, we have not had a centralized DNS PKI. The reason we haven't is that we don't need one. The way you know that is that virtually nothing has been compromised owing to a lack of it.

I honestly don't care what you think of key pinning. By 2016 I was advising clients against doing it. My point about your "pinning" timeline thing is that you sort of conveniently neglected to mention Certificate Transparency, pretending as if, when key pinning broke down, everyone just ignored the underlying problem. Obviously, no.