[haswell]

It would help to better understand your criteria vs. an arbitrary label like yellow flag.

I was not aware of the elephant killing incident, have not experienced their poor tooling (because I have not used them) and was not aware that GoDaddy squats expired domains.

Does this lack of knowledge yellow flag me as a competent person?

Domain registration often happens in a hurry. After a brainstorm that revealed an aha! In that moment, the only thing that matters is grabbing that domain while it's still available. Someone hurriedly registers the thing, with knowledge that it can always be moved later.

If you want to judge a company based on the early inception of the domain, often before deeply technical/experienced folks get involved, that's obviously your prerogative. But I think you'd be unnecessarily filtering out great opportunities in the process.

Oh, and didn't Google Domains use GoDaddy and others behind the scenes for awhile?

[lostcolony]

Is there greater danger in passing over a possibly competent startup with technical debt such as this, or greater danger in ignoring a potential sign?

Obviously it's not a 100% sign. Just a heuristic. One of many, I'd assume. But I can't fault someone for using one when the cost of a false positive so far outweighs the cost of a false negative.