The fatal design flaw for the Domain Name System was failure to learn from SCSI, viz. that it should always be possible to sacrifice a goat to whatever gods are necessary to receive a blessing of stability. It hardly remains to observe that animal sacrifice is non-normative for IETF standards-track documents and the consequences for distributed systems everywhere are plainly evident.
Goats notwithstanding, I think it is splitting hairs to suggest that the phrase “it’s always DNS” is erroneously reductive, merely because it does not explicitly convey that an adjacent control-plane mechanism updating the records may also be implicated. I don’t believe this aphorism drives a misconception that DNS itself is an inherently unreliable design. We’re not laughing it off to the extent of terminating further investigation, root-cause analysis, or subsequent reliability and consistency improvement.
More constructively, also observe that the industry standard joke book has another one covering us for this circumstance, viz. “There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of processing 2. Exactly-once delivery”