Will these two are probably safe, if you want to be certain I suggest checking with the registry operator itself. You can often find these on https://nic.tld. For example: nic.io, nic.nl, nic.cloud, nic.foo, etc. For com/net/org check ICANN directly: https://lookup.icann.org/

That could easily be a coincidence. For one thing you don't know about all the domains that were searched for that were not registered by the registrar. Only the ones you searched for (which could very easily be registered for another reason meaning there was another signal indicating their desirability and you even said 'and came up with some great ones only to find').

> Do a Google search on Namecheap frontrunning and you’ll find tons of posts of people talking about how it happened to them.

Is this really the way you think? You do a search and if people are reporting a certain 'symptom' well it must be correct. An anecdote. I drank coffee this morning and XYZ happened wow 'many' people had the same experience!

> If you don’t want to lose that great domain name, never search anywhere except Google or Amazon domains.

As others have pointed out you can also just search from the command line using whois. Not sure why you think that Google or Amazon are super safe either. Amazon runs many domains through gandi.net. Either of them have their own downside. At least at Namecheap you can actually last I checked get in touch with the CEO or an actual employee.

Namecheap completely burnt all the goodwill and positive word-of-mouth they had built up.

It would be nice to have an independent and reputable registrar outside of the big co’s but it’s apparent that the shadiness and incentives in the industry don’t allow this to happen.