I haven't seen many real world software supports lookup remote with a hostname, probably windows itself is the only one that I have seen? Meanwhile, url is almost the universal way for lookup remote machine (besides, of course, IP).
That's what mDNS (multicast-DNS) is for (mentioned in the article as the reason to never use .local as a DNS TLD because that conflicts with mDNS). The old Windows hostname lookup is predecessor of modern mDNS, but surprisingly Windows was one of the slowest to adopt modern mDNS. (In part because Microsoft backed a competitor named PNRP: they thought it would be great to have a Distributed Hash Table [DHT] as the data store for hostname lookup rather than just relying on pure "dumb" multicast shouting for anyone on the local segment who can here it. It wasn't a bad idea but managing DHTs is complex and mDNS was a simpler standard.)
At this point almost every major OS (including Windows 10 after the right feature update) mDNS mostly just works out of the box: ask for somehostname.local and if a system responds "oh, that's my hostname" things mostly just work. (mDNS was once called "Bonjour" if that helps connect the dots on what it is and how long many OSes have supported it.)
So don't use .local for DNS and mDNS works fine in so many cases these days you don't really need set a DNS for your local systems anyway. (Though if you do want a setup, I think this article is correct and home.arpa is the safest option available. .lan is also a bad idea because it isn't RFC protected and could be bought by someone as gTLD just as Google bought .dev.)
If you want to protect a webserver inside your home (which seems like a good idea in 2021), you're going to need SSL -- and that requires a domain.
Self signed ssl certs were kinda a solution to this -- and then were largely rejected as being absolutely "insecure" because they, well, were absolutely insecure.
No domain at all means it’s possibly publicly resolvable. You don’t want to name your internal webserver just “ws” because this resolves to 64.70.19.33.
