No. There have been literal decades of effort to deploy DNSSEC, which (1) is a server-to-server protocol that doesn't protect last-mile browser lookups at all, and (2) doesn't encrypt messages or provide any privacy. There have been desultory efforts to tack some kind of last-mile security onto the DNSSEC stack, like TSIG, but even that doesn't encrypt messages or provide privacy.
Despite getting DNSSEC deployed at most of the DNS roots almost a decade ago, and to a point where companies can actually turn it on if they want, DNSSEC adoption hasn't cracked 2% of .COM, and, if you measure popular domains outside the US government, its adoption gets even worse: virtually no major platforms or tech companies use it. Those companies have security teams with people who specialize in evaluating technology and getting it deployed, and they have all come to the conclusion that what the IETF worked on to "improve DNS" wasn't worth it.
Meanwhile, virtually every major ISP in America monetizes DNS lookups for their customers. Not only that, but most real DNS spoofing attacks are either last-mile interceptions or phishing attacks on registrars. Which is to say, while the IETF was futzing around with a 1990s-cryptography signature scheme nobody is going to use, the real problem was right there waiting to be solved. Thankfully, Mozilla solved it, and in just a couple years DoH has protected more people on the Internet than DNSSEC is likely ever to.
I mean, DNS is a protocol from the dinosaur days of the internet, where cryptography just wasn't a concern for anything. It's also foundational. Moving to a truly encrypted, private, not-transparently-backward-compatible protocol was never likely to see better adoption than DNSSEC.
IMO, telling all this to someone who has no historical context and innocently asks "Why not just fix DNS?" is lighting a candle with a flamethrower. Plus all the strong emotions that get conjured by DNSSEC and its history (at some point someone will chip in asking about DNSCurve...).
The important points for the casual observer are that people have considered updating DNS and that DNS is unfixable for political and economic reasons. Which is why the best answer we have today is to tunnel it over HTTPS.
DoH is essentially the IETF's version of DNSCurve. DNSCurve (and then DNSCrypt) were at base the idea that we should secure DNS bottom-up, starting from the resolvers, rather than what the IETF had been doing, which was the top-down start-at-the-roots concept of DNSSEC. Neither DNSCurve nor DNSCrypt had any real push in the IETF that I can find; Dempsky wrote an I-D for DNSCurve back in 2010 that has like 2 mailing list posts about it, and I can't find anything for DNSCrypt despite it actually having users.
Meanwhile, the idea that we can't do anything but tunnel DNS through HTTPS because of inertia or politics is obviously false, because there are competing proposals, one of them with serious IETF energy, that don't do that. They're just not popular among users.
I remember during 2009 IETF meeting talking about using end-to-end, and the response I got back was that DNS resolving must be a simple caching server at the ISP end because companies has shown that for every millisecond slower a website loaded there was a noticeable loss in sales, and thus anything that impact performance would not be acceptable.
Under that mentality you could not do much with the last-mile, and you can definitely not do any serious security that protect confidentiality between client and server. You could do something DNSSEC because it did not cause a 10ms lookup to go to 11ms, and thus no one was screaming bloody murder over it.
Which is "something must be done; this is something" logic, right? It's pretty plain to see that the operator community did not in fact want DNSSEC, despite its favorable latency characteristics.
The original intent behind dnssec is before my time working in the dns industry, and when it come the last couple decades the larger push seems to be focused on making people feel more secure in using dns for identification and authentication purposes. How well it does the job depend a lot on the threat model, and how large the actually risks are for that model.
How likely is it that an attacker can take over an domain on say cloudflare/microsoft using dns authentication, or someone managing to spoofing an email by changing the dmarc signature? On the average case I suspect the risk is very small, but then I don't think that specific attack surface has been well tested enough to demonstrate how good the idea is to put keys and proof of identity in dns without any additional system to validate the records.
I worked at Network Associates not long after they bought TIS, which had the original DARPA contract for DNSSEC, and had been working on DNS security for at least 2 years prior to that, and the push then was (unfortunately) the same as it is now: to authenticate the DNS, to create a resilient global PKI that can be used to increase the importance of the DNS in other applications. Privacy has literally never been in its remit; that's why they spun up a separate WG (DPRIVE) to work on it.
Despite getting DNSSEC deployed at most of the DNS roots almost a decade ago, and to a point where companies can actually turn it on if they want, DNSSEC adoption hasn't cracked 2% of .COM, and, if you measure popular domains outside the US government, its adoption gets even worse: virtually no major platforms or tech companies use it. Those companies have security teams with people who specialize in evaluating technology and getting it deployed, and they have all come to the conclusion that what the IETF worked on to "improve DNS" wasn't worth it.
Meanwhile, virtually every major ISP in America monetizes DNS lookups for their customers. Not only that, but most real DNS spoofing attacks are either last-mile interceptions or phishing attacks on registrars. Which is to say, while the IETF was futzing around with a 1990s-cryptography signature scheme nobody is going to use, the real problem was right there waiting to be solved. Thankfully, Mozilla solved it, and in just a couple years DoH has protected more people on the Internet than DNSSEC is likely ever to.