I'm not a blockchain fan but "somebody tried this once and it didn't work" is hardly a dismissal of an entire class of ideas. Beanz didn't catch on but bitcoin seems to have.
Not just 'somebody', but like a dozen different somebodies with many different methodologies. Getting an 'alternate root' DNS system trusted in any appreciable percentage of popular operating systems and web browsers, in a default out-of-the-box configuration, is a very hard problem to solve.
Yes, it is a very hard problem to solve. This is primarily because a 30 year old DNS system is entrenched into the infrastructure of the internet, it was not built to change and so implementing changes fights the network effect.
The only solution to this problem is brute force. The problem is a brick wall. The only way to get past it is to keep creating newer, adaptable naming systems and supporting them. Every attempt to create a domain registry system that is not centrally controlled I will support, even though most of them will fail.