That’s not always how DNS is used in practice. There are lots of different configurations where there’s a local portion that represents a non-global name. This

That’s not always how DNS is used in practice. There are lots of different configurations where there’s a local portion that represents a non-global name. This isn’t necessarily best practice, mind you, because it can have security implications if the name doesn’t resolve locally but does remotely. To make this practice work consistently, the .local TLD is specifically reserved for such use cases in mDNS. Now I should mention, all TLDs should be reserved even if only used locally because of above security implications, but there’s nothing preventing people from abusing DNS in a local setting to resolve names differently than they do remotely.