Local hostnames have never been supported by the IANA or anyone else as far as I know. Using them is risky because they usually work, but the specs say they shouldn't.

Local domains are easy to implement right by registering any domain name (even a free one) and setting that as your local DNS domain. If you register pantalaimon.gq and set that as your local DNS suffix, any non-FQDN hostname should be resolved to host.pantalaimon.gq. Entering http://netflix/ will resolve to http://netflix.pantalaimon.gq/. Such a system also gives you more control over your local DNS, as you can do more than A and AAAA records now. Only http://netflix./ would that actually constitute as a FQDN and bypass the local domain.

I used to use internal DNS infrastructure without a domain until I realised all DNS queries were being sent to DNS because the DNS suffix my ISP appended (something like example.com), resulting in occasional queries to servername.example.com that failed.

If you use domains to refer to localhost, just use .localhost as the TLD: it's been reserved for that exact use.

In fact they are somewhat "supported" as there are some reserved domains that you can use as they won't have an external meaning.

https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-chapin-rfc2606bis-00.html#ne...

Consider putting your "local" hostnames under .localdomain .domain .lan .home .host or .corp

Personally I think .lan and .corp are the best options.

Not if the final dot to denote the root zone were to be brought back, i.e. https://netflix./

Brought back? It's still a thing and required.. your OS's DNS implementation might not handle it in the way you expect though ;)

Already works, doesn't need bringing back!

Maybe local hosts would shadow it, or you'd have to use some prefix.

It does feel a touch dystopian though.