For airliners and other IFR traffic, that is almost (but not quite) true. In the US, the overwhelming majority of airspace below 18K feet and the vast majority of airports do not require any air-traffic-control interaction at all. It's "see and avoid" under VFR in those areas.
With airplanes there's a whole system in place to make sure that every airplane essentially gets its own private road. This simplifies the problem of automation immensely.