That's true but most people don't understand what subdomains are, so we're back to being (more) difficult for laypersons.
> And there’s also example.org and example.net
Well, that's a good point. There are options.
As far as laypersons are concerned, I would worry that they wouldn’t recognize foo.example to be a domain name, as opposed to www.example.com or blog.example.com.
But in your example, you're comparing different structures. "www.foo.example" is somewhat more clear.
