It's complaints about the hosts.txt era fail to understand what was the internet at that stage, a mostly academic network with limited reach and not a lot of hosts, justo one of the ways to connect computers back then and no idea of if that in particular was just a blip in the radar or a long lasting and global network, in a world that had no concept of i.e. "malware redirecting users to malicious websites". It's was a solution for the scale and expectations to grow at the beginning, and it was long deprecated by the time internet got anything near to comercial use.
Lot of mistakes in this?
Pointing out precisely what you think could be mistakes would be useful.