Obsolete? My team has an onboard document that spells out lines that needed to be add to host file so they can access internal resources. These are machines directly bought/rented and maintained by the team, so we prefer to use host files instead of going through the company DNS, which is maintained by an entirely different team.

> manually editing the hosts file was a mostly-obsolete practice by the time the first version of Windows shipped

This claim strikes me as obviously wrong.