If you were stranded with a punctured tire in an area without cell service, would you have died from exposure? Or would you have figured out how to change your tire? I don't think you're an imbecile, so I think you would have figured it out. It's an easy sort of problem for an adult human to solve using little more than common sense, even if you've never been taught how to do it and never cared to learn anything about it before. The general population is capable of much more than you give them credit for.
You introduced the shoelaces level unnecessarily at the start of this whole debacle. Computers are, to the people we're holding under discussion here, a BAZILLION times more complicated. You can't make your shoes vanish by holding a lace slightly wrong. You can make your work 'disappear' in any of myriad ways, by accidentally mistaking a single keystroke, or leaving out a step, or doing something 'extra' as one person put it to me.
And the tire analogy is also skewed. Tires are another thing that's phenomenally less complicated than computer use, to someone who hasn't studied it yet.
You're holding up much simpler concepts and saying that if people can figure out a 10^3 complicated situation, they can figure out a 10^50 complicated situation.
So yeah, you indeed never worked in IT then. Never mind, this discussion is already beyond ridiculous.
I work for 25+ years in IT in huge technological companies. I can tell you that in these technological companies the level of knowledge about things above the very basics (and how to use a bookmark is way above that) is poor to say the least.
This is something I know very well, not some kind of vague deliberation. If you have managed IT operations in a large company you would know. I therefore assume that you do not.
Now - expand this to the whole population.
And as for the car - I had to check if I had a spare a few weeks ago, when the car mechanic who was coming to fix my punctured tire asked me. He had to direct me as to where to look. I am probably an idiot, of the kind of idiots who are not interested in cars. But I do not call the ones who are not the same.