Some perspective: in 1986 the Internet experienced a congestive collapse that reduced the useful throughput by 3 orders of magnitude. End users noticed, and if it happened today there would be pandemonium.
The Internet has become so robust and reliable that end users take the network for granted. At this point most of the headline-making incidents involve services running on the Internet, not the Internet itself (at least in the US, EU, and other highly-connected regions/countries; there are still countries that can be taken offline by just one cable being severed, and their Internet users cannot take the network for granted yet). In my adult life there have only been a handful of significant, global outages/reductions in service quality on the Internet itself. Regional outages happen from time to time, though few are significant enough to make national or international news.
So yes, network-level improvements mean a lot to end users -- they mean that end users can rely on the network itself, and only have to worry about problems at higher levels of the stack.
