Some of these are pretty pretentious and it means one company can claim the 2ld for their industry, eg https://story.new and https://repo.new

I agree, writing more about my reasoning last year at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162905. It gets you an only slightly shorter URL, while significantly diluting trust.

Why? From my point of view it's no different from any other 'pretty' domain name.

A lot of these TLDs just put anything up to justify their reasoning for registering the domain. They don't believe that is how the domain will be (ab)used, but they have to publicly provide some nonsense reason for its existence.

I looked up the application for .one gTLD today. I own a subdomain and I wanted to know the original reasoning behind it. It is (now) owned by one.com and they basically told ICANN "we are going to do ONE stuff with it. Like stuff to do with ONE. And we have customers. And like, er, Beanie Babies?" And ICANN said "That sounds excellent, here's the domain, please continue with your master plan."

I wonder if it feels more natural for different cultures or language structures, to me doing something like sheets.new isn't the order I output in - something like "/new sheets" (and without the .) feels normal, natural, but perhaps because of my own personal experience and exposures.

It already has traction. sheets.new is a very common shortcut.