From the people I've spoken to about this, I'd say less than half even know that the 737Max is a thing, never mind that it's crashed twice.

That is very interesting as it's been front-page news regularly in pretty much every newspaper (ok, I only read the NYT and WSJ, but it's quite the topic of discussion on those two papers).

Every time there is news my entire office lights up with discussion about it. Then again, I work for a company called "Pilot" so perhaps people are more interested than average. It's not an aviation company though ;)

The DC-10 did fine after its rough start. It's still flying today.

That's also the interesting part.

The DC-10 ended-up being a reliable airplane, but its early crashes damaged its reputation heavily, and the handling of these issues by MD was poor.

Commercially, MD never completely recover, and was absorbed by Boeing in the 90ies. (To be honest, it's not the only factor, you have also the L1011 competition and the fact a trijet was somewhat of an evolutionary dead end).

Boeing is much larger, and much stronger it can probably cope with it, but it will be a hit on their best selling aircraft. It's basically the 737 that finances the new 777 or 787, costly programs not certain to recoup design costs (same with Airbus, the A320 is basically financing the A380 failure). At the same time, part of the 737 market is a bit captive with the biggest low cost companies (Southwest, RyanAir) using it unlikely to switch.