Per the article 0.2% of .com domains are phishing vs 4.2% of .top. Or put another way, if you have a .top domain it's about 17 times as likely to be phishing than a .com domain.

.com has the most phishing domains by virtue of by far being the biggest, not because they have looser controls or are less reliable.

Only if you select a random domain from a list of all .com or .top domains. No one does that of course. The chance a random .top (or .com) you encounter is a phishing domain isn't so easily calculated, depends on where you see it, etc.

Quality is relative. A far larger percentage of .com domains are legitimate.

Quora, Pinterest, Medium, The New York Times, Scribd, etc

I think the blog universe would only benefit if medium ceased to exist.