I think their use case is worse, but their mental model probably includes other TLDs - or at least they've probably GONE to other TLDs. Some (More? many? most?) people just prefer to type URLs into Google for some ungodly reason. I watched a junior web designer do it today, and she certainly knows what URLs are; it's just How You Do That. For you and me, it seems like an extra hop, but for her, the extra hop would be to realize "I already know this URL" and override her muscle memory.

Then again, I set up an alias called "gwssh" that goes to our EC2 gateway machine and then to the target machine, and more than once I've typed "gwssh gate" because I'm too "lazy" to type "ssh gate".