Yes because not everyone understands x.y.z and y.x are not owned by same person.

Should we design standards for the dumbest of the lot lol? Not everyone understand that TLD is then maybe they should be educated rather than appeased to.

Also it seems to be primarily USA's issue. Every other nation uses their domain for internal websites (like cats.de) where's Americans tend to just clump everything in `.com` and act all confused by simple TLD scheme.

I don't think a person qualifies as "dumbest" because they do not know what a TLD is. Not everyone has to understand everything else in the world to be a human and use it. Not everyone knows how to be a mechanic but lots drive vehicles and fly in planes.

The issue with your generalization of America is flawed. The internet started in America so "we" clumped everything into .com because we could. TLDs for countries came as a way to organize and route better. A German requesting amazon.com, should goto amazon.de. (This all happened before amazon and CDNs and other things.)

It is ignorant to think a fundamental concept of domain resolution, TLDs is something everyone should understand to use the internet. Do you know how your cell provider takes a request to dial a number and resolve it to another person across towers and potentially hard wired cabling? Most don't and they all make calls.

In this particular instance at least, .dev is targeting developers, who do tend to know these things.

“Don’t you guys have phones?”

Compare and contrast whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com

A company owning whitehouse.com and a government entity owning whitehouse.gov? I'd call that working as intended.

The .com used to be a porn website, in the 90s. That might have been working as intended, but has surprised quite a few people.

And the original discussion was someone claiming that having different TLDs were superior to subdomains for maintaining identify.