If the official purpose is to be able to reach out to people the domain belongs to, it is a stupid design.

I have a car. When police wants to know who the car belongs to they ask the registrar for the match between the number and my name.

I live in France and only French police can check that. If US police need this info, they will contact the French police.

I have a .fr domain. It should be managed by a French entity, which would hold my contact data and reveal them to the autorities.

ICANN would like to have this authority everywhere in the world, no surprise that prior put bogus data.