At least in windows, the hosts file can point from any domain to any IP. In theory you can do things like point advertising domains to 127.0.0.1 if you wanted to make sure web requests never made it off your local machine. I did this a lot back in the day to test websites running locally but pointed to a friendlier name than localhost:randomport
I’m pretty sure this post is designed to kill the soul. I am made slightly worse for witnessing this abortion of an implementation and I will never be quite the same again.