I tried to buy some of those. IMO, it's all DOA because the crypto currency end of it makes it too hard to deal with. I wanted a Handshake domain and a .eth domain. I even set up an account at an exchange to buy crypto which involved giving a TON of personal information / ID to satisfy KYC/AML regulations (in Canada).

I gave up eventually. I realized I couldn't figure out exactly how the ENS domain registration worked, how much it actually costed because of volatility and gas prices, and I didn't know if it would be 1 (ETH purchase), 2 (+ ENS purchase), or 3 (+ ETH sale) taxable events triggered by the transaction(s).

After giving up on the ENS stuff I signed up for a namebase.io account and realized I'd have to give them all the same KYC/AML info I gave the other exchange. Since they're not even regulated by my country's regulator (FINTRAC), there's zero chance I'm giving them all that info. Plus, all the tax stuff related to the .eth domains would apply, so I just gave up.

I wanted domains, not crypto assets :-(

That's not a new idea, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root for a list of alternatives, and https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826 for arguments against them.

Handshake (https://handshake.org) is a good option here which tries to be somewhat compatible with the old system.

Yeah I found this project several years ago and concluded it was the most holistic solution. Problem is it doesn't have as easy onboarding as projects which only seek to replace singular TLDs with non-ICANN-centralised DNS such as Namecoin and the Ethereum Name Service.

What actually happened to Namecoin?

It's been a decade since I last heard from it.

Same, I was quite interested in this, and even used it for a while, but it seems to have just fizzled.