One of the interesting points here is that WHOIS, as of RFC 812, catalogued "each individual with a directory on an ARPANET host, who is capable of passing traffic across the ARPANET". That is, it seems that WHOIS used to be contact points for people who ran servers that made up the internet. That makes sense to me.

At some point, it turned into cataloguing domain names, even if those domain names just pointed to things hosted on some other service. I wonder how formal / intentional that change was.

It does both. You can use whois to lookup IP or domain name.

I suspect it most likely was: "we already have whois database, let's use it for domains as well."

It's true that WHOIS always catalogued both name and IP, but in the early days, they corresponded to the same position in the network. The information for the owner of that block was already in the ARPANET directory that WHOIS duplicated.

Domains and IPs used to be closely tied together, but that’s not the case anymore - when you WHOIS the IP lizdenys.com is at, you don’t get anything, but when you WHOIS the name lizdenys.com, you get information about me. Getting my personal information when you WHOIS lizdenys.com isn’t in the spirit of getting the information in the original WHOIS directory.

It's a bullshit power grab backed 100% by the special interests in the "entertainment" industry. Thank you for your insightful analysis. It makes excellent points salient to why this proposed policy change shouldn't be approved.