You're right on, but I wouldn't call it sad.
The population is expected to operate vehicles without putting others in danger, not credentialize in how cars work. There are endless amounts of things we could demand people spend their precious time deeply understanding. We just like to demand tech-savviness because it's self-aggrandizing.
Like everything else, the solution is to help people on their own behalf.
At an online casino I once worked at, we ended up generating random passwords for our users. We had to, because otherwise attackers would lookup usernames in the large password dumps online and log in as our users. No amount of warnings on our /register page stopped password reuse. So we decided we could do better than that, and that "well, we warned you" was not an appropriate response.
If you look around at everyday objects, everything is designed to protect the user. But for some reason in computing we're still in the dark ages of snickering and rolling our eyes at users for making mistakes.