While you're not wrong, I suspect that .lan sees more real world usage than .local

It may not be an official standard, but it does have some weight as a de-facto standard.

I've tried briefly to try and find some numbers to back that up, but can't find much beyond apple's bonjour vs consumer routers - although I've seen companies with AD domains using .lan as well. (Although, I've also seen companies using 1.0.0.0/8 for their internal addressing...)

it definitely gets used, and i hope that the application is denied, but i also hope this is another wake up call for people that pick unreserved domains.

Wake up to what? The fact ICANN have failed in their governance responsibilities by not encoding a widely used defacto private namespace into the reserved namespace RFC and considering delegating it publicly?

whether you consider this a failure of ICANN or not is completely beside the point.

if you choose to use an unreserved domain, you are choosing to accept the risk of something like this happening. take ownership of your choices. "but other people use it" is not a great defense.

It's a default on OpenWRT and Ubiquiti devices. I don't think consumers should be blamed nor suffer because they didn't know their pricey Ubiquiti router was using a de facto but not officially reserved TLD. you can blame Ubiquiti i guess, but once upon a time there were no reserved TLDs and it was the job of ICANN to deny new ones that had widespread understanding not to be internet routable, so it's not like there's no precedent for Ubiquiti's behavior either.

it would be more defensible of ubiquiti 7 years ago, before the whole .dev situation. not as much anymore

Bear in mind the advice on these things changes over time, and it's possible that the situation in the past may not have been as clear cut.

As an example, at one point in the past (I think in the 90's?), Microsoft recommended using .local for AD domains, whereas now they explicitly recommend against it.

I've habitually used .home since 2014 when its ICANN delegation was indefinitely deferred.