Additionally, as much people like to harp about "telcos focusing on connection-oriented protocols while we ran loops around them with packets", the reality is that NCP and later TCP pretty much focused on emulating serial lines around, and one of the earliest ways to access ARPAnet outside of machines directly on it was through calling into a TIP which set up bidirectional stream from your modem to a port on some host.
The idea with packets is that you don't need to reserve N bit/s of each link along the route to whatever system you're talking to; instead you just repeatedly say "here's a chunk of data, send it to X". It's not really relevant that the typical thing to do with these packets is to build a reliable stream on top of them, what matters is that everything except the endpoints can be a lot dumber.
Fortunately there is the 2.25 OID arc now, which you can use without any registration with anyone. There are also other ways to register OIDs for free. (I think that it is better than using domain names, which can be reassigned, and also require registration anyways. IDN is an even more severe problem (it could have been designed better, but they made it worse instead).)
I had idea (which would have to later be made standardized by ITU or ISO (preferably ITU)) of a new OID arc which allows you to combine an existing identifier (of many different types, such as: international telephone numbers, amateur radio call signs, internet domain names (encoded as bijective base 37), IP addresses, ICAO airport codes, etc) with a timestamp, and optional auto-delegation. (You can then add additional numbers like you can with other OIDs too)
Binary protocols have other benefits as well, such as not requiring escaping, and allowing binary data to be transferred is a way that is not as messy, not causing problems with character sets, etc.
Binary protocols just meant you actually needed to implement serialiser/deserialiser and similar tooling instead of writing dumbest possible riff on strtok() and hoping your software won't be used anymore once DoD internet becomes mature
That's also why the majority of OIDs in SNMP are rooted in the 1.3.6 hierarchy, which belongs to the DoD.