What is a better alternative? Is there one?

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Ultimately, you're going to depend on other parties behaving in a common interest, whether that's your email provider, your ISP, your registrar, anyone accepting your ip address announcements...

And then you have an endless stream of spam, people knocking on ports, etc. Better to keep things airgapped. All one really needs in life is a cyberdeck utility running on freertos in an MCU. Then you are truly captain of your own ship and own your world of compute.

You can probably sue if the registar just gives it to someone else. Which is as good as owning anything is gonna get.

Not if the country is taken over by a military coup and they recapture all the domains, e.g. Mali.