TLD's are commonly used for things other than what they actually mean. .co (Columbia) is used as a cheaper .com (commercial). .io (Indian Ocean territories) is used for tech-related stuff (input/output). .es (Spain) is used to make English domain names plural. Many other examples abound. One problem resulting from this is a sort of class system for TLD's - .com/.net/org are the Brahmans, and everything else one of the lower casts to varying degrees.
When I step back and look at the system critically, it's a mess, semantically at least. Though to its credit it works despite that (or maybe even because of it - flexibility to break rules and repurpose parts for unforeseen uses). Given that hindsight is 20/20, are there alternative TLD systems that capture the range of semantic meaning and intent better, and that don't result in tiers of (perceived) value?
Instead, everything should be under ccTLDs, and then maybe we could have one additional non-ccTLD to cover organizations or companies that are truly international in scope.
Then each country gets to decide how they want to operate their ccTLD, perhaps with the caveat that domain registrants should be required to be citizens of that country, and you can't register a domain for someone else unless you're a licensed registrar and your company operates exclusively in that country and the legal entity you're registering for also operates exclusively in that country.
Now, there could be holding companies with hundreds of subsidiaries, one for each country, but at least those subsidiaries would automatically and naturally comply with all data sovereignty laws.
Yes, that would be more work for companies that want to have registrations in every TLD, but then they should be willing to do that work or pay for it to be done.
There are still plenty of short ones out there, and a common tactic is for people to work backwards from the domain, and call their brand/product/service the domain name instead of starting with a name and then trying to find a .com for it.
On the other hand, there are spammy/sketchy gTLDs like .cyou[1] which are mostly used by malware authors and spammers.