That would be so cool and would make these limited hot commodities.

.name was one of the very first expansions of gTLDs back in the very early 2000s. It's a shame that it's being shut down as it was spearheaded by the ICANN itself rather than some registrar / investor like Donuts, Inc.

I suppose this is impractical as someone has to run the registry and there are costs associated with that. But don't the domain fees cover it?

From having worked in that space what feels another lifetime ago, I vaguely recall that you can just offload the registry work to a registry that would manage this together with a mountain of other TLDs.

As I recall it. This was mostly a money scam that targeted private users with ads like "make sure to claim to your .name domain so no one else does it and use it to impersonate you". It was stupid from the beginning and never took off.