Btw, I highly doubt Nauru makes much money selling their ccTLD, they manage it directly on the island and each domain costs a whopping 500$/year.

Better examples: Tuvalu (.TV), Anguilla (.AI)

Both of these countries (anguilla is not independent though) only get a cut of the money from the domains; all the technical management is done by GoDaddy for .TV and Identity Digital for .AI. In my opinion, very sad.

.AI was run by a local guy in Anguilla (Vince Cate) utilizing the https://cocca.org.nz/ domain SaaS, but Identity Digital took over in late 2024.