To expand on my comment: Google bought .dev and started selling domains. In truth, developers probably only noticed because Google pre-loaded their .dev TLD into HSTS, which meant that any domain ending in .dev, even if it's a local one or one you own, must communicate over HTTPS if you want a browser to interact with it.

As a result, even if you bought steves-laptop.dev for yourself, you still wouldn't be able to run an HTTP dev environment on it, you'd need to set up HTTPS. I think that was probably a good move by Google, because otherwise it could've taken weeks for most devs to notice.

People were using .dev for internal things and acted surprised when Google decided to use it on the internet.