Ethereum should also make plenty of sense to an average programmer who understands basic cryptography. The concept of a distributed virtual machine shouldn't be difficult to grasp.
You could dive deeper into either of the topics you mentioned and start losing people - for example how QUIC carries a TLS handshake, or why enshrined proposer-builder separation is important to Ethereum. All that means is that both protocols hide complexity under the surface.
That's a pretty bombastic claim with no supporting evidence. What exactly makes the design a clusterfuck, and what do newer chains do that is a significant improvement?
So far all of the alternative chains have been plagued with downtime and centralization of nodes into supernodes (at least in the ones that weren't centralized from the start).
Ethereums problem is that it is a badly designed clusterfuck. The newer blockchains will likely take over.