Right now, I have about dozen unused names that I bought because I was working on some ideas but got side tracked. Maybe I will finish these projects next year or next decade.
But I don't want some 3rd party deciding if I should lose my domains because I didn't write enough code last month.
I have a domain whose only public facing service is just some picture I took. Am I using that domain? Yes, sure. It hosts all kinds of intranet services -- a few are whitelisted to other external IPs. Could I set up my own DNS on my network for those services and not own a public domain for them? Sure. But then I need to make sure anyone joining the network is first configured to use that DNS, instead of just joining the VPN and now the services all publicly available to you.
As far as Joe-public is concerned, I'm just squatting on that domain and not using it.
We have a vast number of potential TLDs now.
It doesn't matter if .com domains (by far the most lucrative squatting target) are being supposedly used for something productive or ... "valuable" (who determines what is valuable? a panel of clowns?).
If there was a good time to do something about domain squatting, it was 20-25 years ago, when we had few TLDs choices and the impact would have been far less due to fewer domain owners. Changing the system now would be a belligerent action against a very large number of existing domain owners. Someone has owned a domain for 22 years and they change the rules now - that's entirely unfair. The deal is, they pay the fee, the domain is theirs; then ICANN is going to change the deal? Letting bureaucrats begin arbitrarily changing the rules is about the worst thing you can ever do. Once you let the weasels in to change the rules in a big way, they'll keep doing it and you will not like the inevitable nightmare it creates.
The lack of supposedly useful domain names is not holding back the Web in any regard what-so-ever. If the domain is the big problem, in reality it's your product or service that is the problem. Owning Jump.com instead of JumpApp.com (made up example) is not the problem, it's the shitty product that nobody wants to use.
Domains are like ideas, it's not where the value is at in a service. Most of the value is in the execution of the thing. Tesla was at TeslaMotors.com in the beginning, it wasn't a problem for marketing. It's the same reason Business.com - after decades - has never turned into a $187 billion company like Salesforce.com, or a $42 billion company like Atlassian, despite such a tremendous name.
Why did I mention Jump.com? Microsoft acquired Jump.com in 1999, shut down the service, and then sat on the domain for the better part of two decades (now living as a redirect for Lime):
https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/microsoft-acquires-lea...
Does it matter that Jump.com hasn't been used for anything meaningful in 20 years? Nope. It doesn't matter even in the slightest.