There is some basis of the fear of new gTLDs being unfavorable. Remeber free-as-in-beer ccTLDs like .tk? They were (are?) indeed ranked lowered than .com et al

There is some basis of the fear of new gTLDs being unfavorable. Remeber free-as-in-beer ccTLDs like .tk? They were (are?) indeed ranked lowered than .com et al due to their nature as being too easy for a spammer to have a new domain. Nowadays though most search engines now include age of domain in their ranking algorithms so this is no longer a real issue.