Eventually the precedent would just become 'poor people' fucking over everyone, including other 'poor people' just trying to start their own business. I get what you're saying but allowing squatters to create entire catalogues of domains for the sake of sticking it to corporations is probably a shitty answer
I don't think they're modern in the sense that they were recently invented/introduced, but modern in the sense that they're now becoming a lot more popular in places that have municipal/city sewer hookups.
Anecdore time: my grandparents built a little cabin on an island when they retired (more Puget Sound than tropical, they weren't bajillionaires lol), but they had one 30 years ago, alongside an outhouse, simply because draining a septic tank on an island cost a fortune. Septic service company basically uses a pontoon retrofitted with a tank and built up to float with that much weight, and they'd have to transfer that to a septic truck in order to haul it away on the mainland.
They've been around for quite some time, but 20+ years ago you'd probably only encounter them being used in niche places like that, or in a recreational vehicle, or in other parts of the world where the cost of municipal water is a consideration
The wild thing is that, at the time, the abandonware DOS games I was playing in the late 90s were more recent than Skyrim is right now.