Yes, public key cryptography is not new. What's new is that crypto incentives has spurred the creation of a highly competitive industry to improve private key m

Yes, public key cryptography is not new. What's new is that crypto incentives has spurred the creation of a highly competitive industry to improve private key management, and incentives people to get and manage one. ENS isn't needed strictly speaking, but highly useful to make everything human-friendly. It's like saying DNS isn't useful because you can just input a website's IP address.