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Why not just alksjdhflkjahdskjfhalskjdhfas.com or something that definitely doesn't exist? Since there's no HSTS on domains that don't exist, it should allow the wifi network to redirect to http://myloginportal/whatever and do its thing so you can access the network.

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Some captive portals do TCP redirection, but no DNS redirection.

And for good reason. Once user has finished jumping through whatever hoops captive portal want them to jump, a new connection to the same server is likely to be attempted, and having a fake DNS response cached somewhere in libresolv or browser in the client is not the least bit conductive to that.

Of course some portals do use DNS and so you end up with your favorite site's home page getting a bunch of irrelevant arguments appended to it, resulting in an error page.

Ah, makes sense. I don't think I've encountered one like that, but I can imagine they exist.

you never know how poorly a restricted WiFi access point is implemented

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