Top-level domains were the one level where names were purely descriptive - you could generally trust that they referred to what they said (.ly was well and truly owned by the government of Libya, whatever it decided to do with it, and .org is for non-profit orgs). Domain names under them were clearly understood to refer to specific organizations - wine.com is usually understood to be some organization, not an authority over all wine.
Now you have things like .wine, and there's suddenly a question - does this represent the abstract concept? Or some specific wine-making trade group? And which one? And is it clear to users what this imprimatur means? Do we trust ICANN to make this kind of decision, which is much more subjective and opinionated than the ones it traditionally has had to make when deciding who to give a TLD to?
Except .org was already free to use by anyone (including for-profit companies, e.g. craigslist.org) and there was .net, which wasn't descriptive in the least, and .info which is even weirder than .net.
What you had was an illusion of meaning, and the new gTLDs killed it. Good riddance.
Well, what's interesting about the ccTLDs is that their "meaning" was purely organizational, but very clear-cut - you could trust that .us was under the ultimate authority of the US government, and that .ly was under Libyan control, no matter how ridiculous their policy for granting those domains was.
But yeah, I think bit.ly and friends really messed up a lot of the logic people expected from the DNS.
Now you have things like .wine, and there's suddenly a question - does this represent the abstract concept? Or some specific wine-making trade group? And which one? And is it clear to users what this imprimatur means? Do we trust ICANN to make this kind of decision, which is much more subjective and opinionated than the ones it traditionally has had to make when deciding who to give a TLD to?