Are you sure you want to make the argument that because words can be interpreted in their least charitable way that that’s what the intention really was?

Reading that proposal is _clear_ to me that it’s for internal use only and that the impact to the global internet is that “it does not exist”. (And even hinting that it’s a good thing).

Obviously they never _comitted_ to never using it, but it is absolutely apparent that their intent was “internal to google, unused outside” and given how poisoned the .dev namespace was already at that time: it was met with somewhat apprehensive open arms.

Google then went and opened it and made it impossible to use locally by pinning HSTS on the TLD level. Which is basically the worst thing they could have done with it, given that people were using it locally already.. and some popular frameworks even recommended it as an option when running locally.

(Though, there is an argument to be made there that they made sure things worked as expected by forcing the public use of .dev)

Obviously it’s fine now. But don’t pretend this was obvious.