I am not speaking about maintainance of DNS zones (that's easy), but about maintanance of authoritative DNS servers.

It's not like DNS is a huge burden by itself, it's just approach of avoiding creation of critical services unless they become necessary. Because infrastructure around them is a burden: they needs additional firewall rules on middleboxes, monitoring, redundancy, IaC, backups etc.

I've never used DNS in my local network (because it's additional burden to support, so I tried to avoid it), but couple of month ago when I needed several internal web-sites on standard http port, I've just came up with "localdomain."

Yep, it's non-standard too, but probability of it's usage of gTLD is lowest among all other variants because of it's usage in Unix world and how non-pretty it is :)

Just write your logs as files on a centralized syslog server with good file structure and you'll be good.

You may really underestimate how fast and convenient grep+less combo is in comparison to webui-based solutions.

TOML is tree-based too. It's just more verbose than YAML for explicivity.

more professional email address

Does it even work?