Or was Google so caught up in their good guy complex that they felt justified to perform a pedagogical intervention on the entire industry?
By forcing HSTS for .dev they broke setups of people who hijacked a domain name they didn't own and that wasn't made for that purpose (and, as others pointed out, there are TLDs reserved for testing that you can use). So they forced those people to fix their stuff. If they hadn't done that .dev probably would have gained the reputation of the TLD that doesn't work, because all kinds of people redirected it to some testing hosts.
It's their TLD, they do whatever they want.
e.g. we use `https://www.splitgraph.test` for local development, which is nice because we avoid a whole class of "works in dev" bugs that you get with `http://localhost:3001`
For the certificate, we use a self-signed certificate signed by a root cert generated by mkcert [1] locally on each developer's machine (to avoid sharing a root cert that could be used to MITM each other).
I wanted to suggest using a .test domain but managing the hosts file is always really clunky, even with a slick tool like hostess[1].
The internal DNS server masks the public one, so that I can assign local IPs at will, use HTTP or HTTPS at will, and when I'm outside of the network, the devices will contact the public DNS server and use the actual public IP of the network to access a limited set of servers (like ejabberd). These servers then stay accessible on the inside but through the local IPs, so that they don't have to leave the local network touching the edge router (which also solves some NAT issues on WebSocket connections).
To be honest, people should've never used `.dev` for testing in the first place, given that IANA has reserved the `.test` domain specifically for that.
By making HTTPS the default for `.dev` they can save a few MS in rewriting the requests and a few bytes for the preload header.
In any case, I think it'd be okay for it to be the default, but I think it's not okay for it to be immutable. I should be able to remove my .dev domain from the preload list if I want to.
TL;DR: Ok default but IMO it should be possible to opt-out.
The problem with standards is no one ever reads them. This was published in 1999.
The TLD namespace was effectively frozen for a long time until ICANN got greedy and decided to sell parts of it off.