It is not an exaggeration that tech companies have far, far more money than they know what to do with. Not all spending looks good to investors, so layoffs must happen, but this is nothing compared to the amounts of money Google, Meta, etc, blow on completely inexplicable / SVP vanity projects every year.

Non-tech companies are getting sucked in, too - see, for example, the applications for .airliquide, .capitalgroup, .dinebrands, .massimodutti, .newbalance, .stubhub, .warhammer, .zarahome, and so on.

From what I've seen thus far, most brand TLDs never get used. (The only significant exception that comes to mind is .google, and even they never really committed to using it.) Who's been going around convincing these companies to apply for this round?

Checked all primary strings for length, the 3 longest (excluding punycode notations):

.superintelligence (17)

.registeredagent (15)

.meditativemind (14)

.intelligence (12) is also in the top 10 longest primary strings.