I agree, although if a business decides to close a service could it get tricky? What if all other providers charge much more and the provider can't sell your domain on to them to manage? Or they sell it on to an unscrupulous provider? A yearly fee means they can't get all the cash up front and then run.

We’re talking about the cost to save a <1KiB database record. The only reason this doesn’t exist is that the entire TLD ecosystem is a rent seeking enterprise.