[adrian_b]

This is true, but TFA argued that the network services themselves should not use /etc/hosts or other similar translation database, so a not yet updated file should not cause a network outage.

TFA proposed that /etc/hosts or the like should be used only for the benefit of administrators, to allow manual connections by name instead of by address, and presumably to make easy to interpret the activity logs. This is a desirable feature, but the network should work fine even when the name-to-address translation is temporarily unavailable, because of not-yet-updated /etc/hosts files.

Actually I have used for decades a system similar to what TFA proposes, avoiding to do DNS queries for the internal networks, while using my own DNS caching resolver for the Internet, but this was done only in relatively small networks, with a few hundred nodes at most, and where the IP addresses were changed infrequently. Thus I have no idea whether in a big network with frequently changed addresses there would be scaling problems.