many people have tried to make decentralized DNS before, was the solution just to piggyback on the mainline DHT this whole time? Or is there more to it?

Personally, I do know the addresses I visit more often and, anyway, recognition is easier than recall.

I used an impartial bot to analyze the note above for propagandistic content. See table below. While there’s a good point about the increase in TLDs, global names clearly have utility, as shown by the fact that people are willing to pay for them. A system that provides a level playing field and avoids large price increases (like those seen with ENS) would be ideal. One possible approach is to let users choose their short names, with a tie-breaking method if multiple users want the same name. Bitcoin's UTXO model could be well-suited for this purpose, though Namecoin faced challenges with implementation.