Yet they are bad at every one of those points.

* An auto increment ID is just as human non-readable as a UUID, it's just easier to get silent collisions from typos.

* The Source is metadata that belongs in a metadata system, not into the ID itself

* the veracity is worthless without verifiability

* gated-ness is just an anti-feature caused by the lack of verifiability

If you you classify identifiers along different axis of their properties, you'll notice that DOIs actually inhabit the completely wrong quadrant for their use-case. (https://docs.rs/tribles/0.5.1/tribles/id/index.html)

Are they human readable? As for veracity, wouldn't baking a digital signature into the paper itself be far more reliable?

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they exist, but they appear to guard against humans who are lazy and make mistakes sometimes rather than against a powerful adversary motivated to interfere with science. It might be time for an upgrade.