Seconding the other comment, lots of orgs picked .lan and then over the last few years have moved things into the cloud and .lan has become a meaningless soup since half the shit isn’t even on local network. Now it just means “needs a vpn or ztn to talk to”
Luckily my last three orgs finally bought a second domain for private dns. It’s quickly becoming a pattern that myorg.com owns myorg.tech or whatever for private traffic. Domains are cheap as fuck compared to everything else a business spends money on, it’s really silly how many people are using hacks for this
I think needing a VPN to access the internal network is a good practice. And if you're going to be used a VPN anyway, I don't see why you wouldn't use a "fake" TLD like .lan for internal stuff, after all it's just simple DNS rules.
It's used in many cases where the machine may not be on the LAN and LAN is a technical term. "Internal" is not and to me signifies that it's "not public" aswell as probably managed by someone, well, internally at the entity you're with.