> Generally owners of those huge popular simple word domain names will be making far more than $850/year from them

This might have been true in the past, but it isn't true anymore, especially not under new gTLDs. Nobody goes around typing in <word>.<tld> domains out of curiosity anymore, and advertisers don't pay anywhere near as much as they used to for impressions on domain parking pages. The vast majority of premium domain pricing is driven by pure greed.