I mean, I wouldn't expect the general public to have "true tech literacy" to the point of knowing the difference between IP classes. That seems above and beyond "literacy" to me. Hell, I wouldn't even expect the general public to know what an IP address is; their exposure to them is both so minimal and so shallow that it doesn't make sense to learn the intricacies of.

For instance, I consider myself to be fairly techy. I run multiple VLANs on the class A space on my home network, so I have decent exposure to IP addresses. And I routinely struggle with CIDR notation to the point where I basically have to use a converter each time because I can't remember which bits correspond to which ranges.

If I have this much trouble, I wouldn't expect the general public to even know what any of what I said is.

I don't think it is literacy really, just sloppy engineering process.

Typically this happens when someone develops a service which is front facing without any proxy/ LB before it, goes to production and gets validated IP and other logs are great everyone moves on . Few months/years down to scale their service or improve security a LB or CF type proxy is put in front and no bothers to check the IP logs are still valid because no one actually uses IP for anything in their tooling( like filters/blocks or geomapping etc) so won't notice the break at all.