Yep, earlier on, the non-country-code ones had rules about who could use them, and the registrar for some of those was expected to be a custodian.
Then they seemed to focus more on making money from registrations, than from the custodian aspect.
Then ICANN created an industry of middleperson (maybe because there shouldn't just be one rent-seeker, but competing ones), and also seemed to bless a market of landgrabbing squatters. (And much more recently, some ICANN-connected people seemed to be scheming to grab a popular TLD for themselves, like a PE firm.)
With most of the good and even bad domain names taken by squatters, there was demand for all sorts of new TLDs (which someone was happy to middleperson).
As well as the risky practice of building your company atop a 2-letter country code TLD, where there's a significant chance of a change in government policy would break a lot of your links, URLs embedded in software, email addresses, and Googlejuice. Or simply have you over a barrel with exorbitant renewal fees (or bribes).
(Historically, some of these ccTLDs were small islands, where there was one sysadmin person running the "ISP" for the island, including domain name authority, and the government didn't necessarily even know/understand.)
TIL dot com is apparently a "commercial" site.