Yeah, unfortunately, domain squatters have poisoned the well for .com domains. There are many, many domains which should be available for use, but are being squatted indefinitely for speculative purposes. This has caused pretty much every new company to migrate to TLDs like .co, .ly, .me, .ai, .in, and .io. Since these are almost all ccTLDs run by countries, governance is not great. .io has been particularly bad;
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578
* https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/27/io_domains_uk_un/