I do not understand your first paragraph. If the last 5 years have demonstrated anything, it's that the US DOJ more or less controls the 3 most popular TLDs. I am not seeing the same decline in government control you do. Please be more specific?
Also: I have a really hard time seeing how baking a CA into the fabric of the Internet is a vast improvement over the current situation we have now, in which we are continually tormented by our reliance on CAs.
I meant what I said: there are 700+ TLDs listed at https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db and the percentage controlled by governments is declining - currently 297 country-code TLDs and a handful of other state controlled domains (including .com). ICANN has been giving out new top-level domains pretty generously and the vast majority of the new ones are non-state domains. Hence, the percentage of state/government controlled TLDs is declining.
No matter what the PKI system is, there will be more and less trustworthy actors around.
I agree that many state controlled TLDs are currently quite popular, but I don't see them as generally less trustworthy than the commercially operated TLDs. Both groups will contain some iffy elements, but I don't know if there's any way to build a system where iffy actors can't play. At least they can only mangle their own domains with DANE. And sounds like DNSSEC should be quite a bit more tamper-evident than our current CA sysetm.
Also: I have a really hard time seeing how baking a CA into the fabric of the Internet is a vast improvement over the current situation we have now, in which we are continually tormented by our reliance on CAs.