And I really don't like that companies like Google/MS can buy their own TLD now. I don't think allowing a trademarked term to be used should have been allowed.

Curiously, dead.mom was redirecting to www.nro.gov, an org with a rather interesting secret history.

The only other market based solution I can think of is just charging like $10,000/yr minimum per domain name and forcing the plebs to use randomly generated strings like Tor onion sites

For personal use, as long as the TLD has a decent enough reputation to use with email (https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/), I'd be fine with almost whatever, too. I personally use a ccTLD, but things like Jeff Gerstmann's site (https://jeff.zone) are fun. There are tons of other examples, this one just came to mind first.

What does feel dodgy and fake to me is when I see a known name with the new gTLDs. Sometimes SaaS have their landing/marketing site on a different TLD than the app itself. If you find both via web search, that looks weird to me.

The city TLDs and highly specialized or non-English ones (like .kaufen, .whoswho, .abogado) and the tons and tons of paid subdomains are so rare that they always seem out of place.