Comment by tok1

One could almost wonder if the explosion of gTLDs in the 2010s has been pushed by registrars as they were seeing Big Money. In (my personal) retrospective, the value for Internet users and their actual usage is vanishingly small--compared to the downsides of massively increased phishing risks and, as you mentioned, the need for companies/brands to nowadays having to register (and pay for) a gazillion of irrelevant TLDs, merely for brand protection and abuse prevention.