The consequences are not quite so dramatically irrevocable. I’ve recently assisted a family member whose hosting provider was bought by a gang of unscrupulous clowns and their domains effectively held to ransom. It took only hours to recover them and switch registrars, during which time I’d used/activated only the same channels and processes available to any other registrant. And AWS are not a gang of pirates.

Someone less directly versed in the intricacies of registries and registrars and service providers might take longer to assert rights, deploy governance machinery, and achieve the same result, but the existential finality described above would be better painted as a time-consuming and Byzantine inconvenience.

I read domain registration horror stories with a pinch of salt. Not just because the sector is (like cryptocurrencies) riddled with scammers and shysters and liars and con-artists, but also because even the most Kafkesque fuckups I’ve seen ultimately started with incompetence, inexperience, arrogance, or negligence (usually omitted in the telling) on the part of the apparent victim.