I mean, it is kind of getting that way. The proliferation of some domains that are more expensive than others could potentially be a sign of the whole thing slowly collapsing into costing $10/month or maybe orders of magnitude more, if you are a big company with fat pockets that can be rummaged through, like everything else is nowadays. My point is that the price is $12 per year specifically because those forces have been kept at bay, at least partially, which means the system is an ever-more-incongruous-with-every-passing-year vestige of the decent way that the internet used to be. And also, yes, there’s an increasing cacophony of services which are trying to charge you more than it should cost, hoping that you’ll think $50/year is reasonable and just pay it not knowing any better.

If you think it is sustainable to be able to submit registrations completely for free, though, you are welcome to provide that service to the world under some subdomain, and do a vital service to remove the evil of which you speak. Just register dns.free or whatever, and set up a thing where people can register mysite.dns.free or whatever subdomain they want, and then they can all have it for free. You can be the change. I suspect that it you undertook this mission, it would quickly become apparent to you why the system as a whole still needs to charge a tiny nominal fee in exchange for doing it.

Running the central DNS servers is so cheap that it makes no sense to try to charge for it. Doing the administrative work of keeping track of hundreds of millions of people who all want to register some appellation for themselves, and keeping track of all the changes thereto, is significant, which is why that side of the operation wants to charge you a few bucks a year for it.