kijeda

You're conflating two different concepts: DNS hosting, and DNS resolving.

This service seems to offer hosting services, i.e. publishing your domain's records in the DNS in DNS authoritative servers.

A DNS resolution service looks up and maintains large caches of DNS data on your behalf, optimizing DNS lookups by not requiring your own device to recursively query many different DNS servers. These lookups start by querying the DNS root zone, which is published by the DNS's authoritative servers which are listed in the root hints file.

Yes, the revised version that alternated through the translations was posted a week ago on Monday. It was revised to no longer do that on Friday based on reasonable feedback that it wasn't the best idea for accessibility. Now all the translations are presented together, but your preferred language will be bumped to the top based on your browser language preference.

Cloudflare is the latest in a number of different CDN providers we've used to serve this over many years. I guess the question is, why is it important not to use a CDN?

I think what you describe is exactly right, it has organically become a service and it is maintained with that in mind. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be clear about what its for and what should be avoided. Otherwise it is setting up an implicit contract that it will service those needs without limitation which turns it into an even bigger dependency.

The US Government ended its involvement in IANA when it moved to an international oversight model in 2016. IANA is operated by Public Technical Identifiers which is an affiliate of ICANN, and ICANN provides all of its funding. Governments have a say in how ICANN operates through its Government Advisory Committee, at which all governments — including the US — have a seat.

Some TLDs like .tk (Tokelau) are offered for free.

Are you sure its not in reference to "Greek" the language, rather than "Greece" the country? "el" is coding for Greek in ISO 639, IANA language subtags, etc.

... and .hm and .nf.

The history on why some external territories are coded is because an international standard is the basis for the two-letters used for these TLDs, and that standard is used for other purposes. Far flung localities are often coded due to things like physical mail delivery or customs boundaries which utilize the same standard.

Why does .eu exist? Essentially because "eu" was coded for the European Union to facilitate "EUR" as a currency code when the Euro was introduced. ISO 4217 currency codes derive from ISO 3166 country codes.

It may seem like a pedantic point, but these top-level domains are not owned. They currently have registry operation rights which does not confer permanent ownership.