Is that different than just running your own nameserver and root? Or could you do what you describe with dnsmasq?
Like maybe there's this super cool blog about guitars my friend akhmad follows but i can't remember the URL right now and of course Google is giving me the worst SEO-induced results. But i know my friend akhmad published it as "guitar" in his zone because he also forgets the name every now and then, so now i can just go to "guitar.akhmad" in my browser (assuming i already have akhmad in my hyper-hyper local root).
Yes this does have some consequences for some things such as TLS validation, but if you want we could get into the details of why that's OK (TLDR: CAs are only good because DNS is bad security for key distribution, DANE over GNS would be arguably more secure).