from a dns server zonefile perspective, it's still plaintext, just some unicode string with the xn-- prefix on it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/

http://xn--ls8h.la/

unicode 1f32e is the taco emoji, so i think I will be migrating all my internal things to http://servername.1f32e

What's worse about dev is that chrome auto-forwarded to the https version even if you were using it internally for testing using your hosts file.

That is the hsts preload list, used across bruises; .dev is no different than any other domain on the list, only that it was the first tld