I see it more like a phone number or postal address, which implicitly also identifies you. Maintaining it generally incurs costs one way or the other. Heck, even the mandatory renewal of national ID cards isn't free.
I believe that identity and identity attestations must be well-separated concepts. I am myself (identity), a government had issued me a passport for $name (attestation), and my friends know me as $nickname (another attestation), etc etc.
Third party attestations/endorsements can be based on any conditions, such as payments, behaviors, or whatever - that's up to third parties to decide. But those mustn't be my identity (because that way my identity becomes something a third party controls, and that's not how things are), they must only refer to it.
It's basically Web-of-Trust again (and I realize any attempts to build a digital one had failed so far)
Well, think of it as a technical term and not a metaphysical one then. Self sovereign cryptographic identification is great, but at some point you have to choose a global namespace so people have a handle to address you by, your choices are some centralized dictatorship like a gmail address or a twitter id, or you can use the globally and politically distributed name resolution system with decades of legal precedent we call DNS.
EDIT: I will concede there is likely some kind of peering/pubsub architecture that would allow for connecting to people you know via QR codes of their DIDs and then using nicknames you distribute to those followers or whathaveyou, I for one am enamored by the design of KERI [0], but I guess you have to decide whether you want people to open a connection to you without any prior negotiation with any of your peers. But if you're OK with people having to be "in-network" or part of a gossiping p2p setup, maybe we can get by without paying third parties for identities.
My concern is that technical quirks tend to sometimes bleed out of their domains and start to change our perception of the society/world itself.
In the meatspace, I'm sure I don't have any single global handle. Here I have an online handle, my wife has a nickname for me, my friends use various names and nicknames too, one country's government had issued me a passport for one legal name, another country's government - for a different one, and so on. So I wonder if thinking of choosing a global namespace is actually a design mistake, as it doesn't match how the world works.
This said, KERI looks interesting - I like the idea that there's no single global ledger, as it matches my own thoughts on the matter. Thank you for the link, I'll save it to my reading list.