When I had my ISP back in the early 90s, everyone in the office registered all those "generic" domains (along with trademarked ones too). My ex-business partner originally registered beer.com, his sister did game.com (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTuQgUe-CME), our billing manager did subway.com and someone even did wallstreet.com.

Those were the days.

This isn't at all the same—this is just one guy who registered a domain forever ago and actually uses it for a bunch of random things [0] and doesn't really want to sell it but would if he got a good enough offer.

Beer.com is literally just a contact form advertising a whole bunch of squatted domains which all just redirect to that contact form and are all owned by an investment firm called afterTHOUGHT, Inc. There's no early internet charm, just pure capitalism waiting for a buyer.

[0] https://milk.com/

Honestly I feel like milk.com is more valuable. Because the US milk industry is commoditized, while beer isn't. An individual beer company doesn't want beer.com, they want budweiser.com—at most, I could see a redirect. You can't sell alcohol efficiently online, and beer review sites don't make very much money.