DNS: the centralised phone book

DNS has often confused me. It is often justified by saying that no-one wants to remember IP addresses as they are a 'very long' string of numbers. To which I can only say, "Almost as long as a phone number?". Indeed, an IPv4 address (we will not talk about IPv6) can only be a maximum of 12 numbers, which is a scare couple of digits longer than most phone numbers in the world. So this has seemed false to me, and even if they were difficult to remember, as it can be for humans, then why does one not keep an... address book? Like we do for contacts in a phone book?

The answer seems to be that DNS is simply a centralised phonebook. All addresses are mapped to a name by a central authority. This was then taken advantage of by people looking to make money from renting out literal strings of characters because... well, they said so. And just one downside to this centralised system is that there can be no duplicate strings as they cannot co-exist in the same database. Unlike an actual phone book or address book where you yourself keep your own ledger of name-to-number mappings. In your own address book you even have control over what you want to label other people's numbers.

If we were free to make our own mappings and keep them locally, then a multitude of scams could not take place as the official IP address of a website could no longer be closely mimicked to fool those with poor font choices or eyesight. There would also be no business in selling pieces of text, which is so ridiculous and stupid as a concept that it should be frowned upon. You could also say that power (energy) would be conserved as there is no longer a middleman resolving these names to numbers, because that's a pointless abstraction that appears to exist soley for monetary gain (for the few individuals who hold the power).