[hoistbypetard]

One annoying quirk of the .us cctld is that those administrators don't allow whois privacy like most gtlds do. So as soon as you register one, the phone number you associate with it gets destroyed by marketing solicitations.

So in addition to being a "frustrating legacy quirk", the administration of the cctld makes it more appealing to use a global tld whenever possible. That is not me buying into the BS you cite... it's just learned experience based on my dealings with those TLD aministrators.

(Source: I own multiple .us domains, and it's a headache for the reasons I described above.)