If they used DNS validation it would be better because there would be only one point of failure (DNS) rather than many (DNS and every ISP between CA and a site).
Thanks to widely available HTTPS certificates, "evil hackers stealing your cookies on public Wi-Fi" is not a thing anymore.
We should definitely have a discussion about whether it's made active attacks more feasible, but I think the goal of making passive sniffing less trivial than it was before can be considered achieved.