This strikes me as a little disingenuous. Neither IPFS nor DAT are inherently dependent on DNS. If you're referring to HTTP the gateways that lots of people use with both IPFS and DAT in order to host static sites, arguably that's because support for UDP and other useful p2p tools in the browser is experimental! But people still find both IPFS and DAT useful for hosting static files. (libdweb is really exciting by the way: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb)

From what I can tell, most "serious deployments" of DAT and IPFS are made by people directly using the loose underlying collections of libraries that implement each of them. These people often end up putting together application specific transport and discovery layers that work for their specific application.

Except that, from the article, the only way to really use IPFS for pretty names is to use DNSlink and not IPNS. Because IPNS is unusably slow.

So IPFS might not theoretically rely on DNS, but it seems that it does practically rely on DNS if you actually want to use it.