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.