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.

I'd probably avoid something like games.fun or music.biz, those just sound unpersuasive.

By the way, about 95% of .com domains are squatters, which pisses me off to no end.

Objectively they aren’t though.