Domain names and seo.

This is intended both for a topic of discussion, but to also share my recent experience.

Everywhere I look, there are many articles saying that having keywords in a domain are beneficial to a website. There are only a small handful saying that "in 2022, this is no longer relevant."

ok.... so whats the final answer.

Then I found a bunch of websites say that keywords in domain names have no effect, UNLESS its a localised TLD. Such as:
.com.au
.sydney
(there are many . city now available to many).
Is this for real?? Does keyword domains in a . city tld affect seo??

So I decided an experiment. (There are a bunch of city TLD's so people from across the world may or may not benefit from this discussion.)

I set up a site, example 1 . com.au. Minimal information. No keyword built content or other. Its a site, with basically a bunch of pretty pics, and call to action button.
For reference, a .com.au is around $45 dollary doos for 2 years, or $33 freedoms if you are used to USD.

I also set up another site, keywords . sydney. (for reference, this domain is discounted for the first year and then it is $65 dollary doos for a second year, or $49 freedoms. This is not a cheap or spammy TLD by any means)
On this website, I filled it with more information on the services provided. The homepage has substantially better quality content. BOTH websites are intended to be as a business home page, for the same company.

I submitted both urls to google to crawl. At the 4-6week mark, the on page and off page seo and backlinking done on both of them was ZERO.

But, I could go to google and search for "example 1 . com.au" and find the exact website. Thats great. In fact, I can find it by typing in "example 1". Wonderful. The keyword based domain??? Well, I cant type in the real url ie "keywords . sydney" and no results found.even having http.... THE FULL url no result.

I have since made a few articles, and submitted each url to google. Even going to google with the exact motha f***ing URL, google shows NO RESULTS even though each one is crawled by google, and I can check stats with googles url inspection tool.

So does keywords in a domain name help your website in 2022? My results say no, and if anything, having keywords in a domain name can see your website penalised, but of course, your results may vary.

Im still running this experiment. Domain expires in ~10months time. I might have an update soon as I have am adding more articles to "keywords . sydney" and have hired someone to help with seo.