Posting from a throwaway account.
I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well.
It is well know amongst the domain name community that ICANN is a poorly run organization, whose directors have in recent years have used their position of leadership to lead decisions from which they are afterwards benefiting themselves economically, in many cases by rushing decisions such as in these case.
Peter Dengate Thrush was famous for pushing for the new domain extensions (.anything) as chief executive of ICANN and quitting a month later to become the CEO for a company that was the main bidder for a large number of extensions. Fadi Chehade is doing the same with .ORG by lifting the price cap on the prices of an established domain name and then gobbling up the company that sells those domains.
Sadly, ICANN has little oversight and since its kind of in the air and doesn’t report to anyone, the directors get away with what would be legally considered corruption in most of the world. The fact that the internet community and most Internet companies have never care about it makes doesn’t help, since a lot or times the “multistakeholder” model that they claim to use in reality doesn’t work.
Ultimately, this is why the DNS and domain name industry feels so shady in general and why for most companies getting a name on the internet is a tortuous process that feels very scammy, which is unfair and costs more than it probably should. But so far we don’t have any good alternatives to the current system.