Making sure that your domain registration is always current is not a difficult thing, though. You can register for fairly long periods of time, and set up multiple alerts to manually renew long before it expires.
I’m wondering whether that’s valid and if I should find a new registrar…
FWIW, name.com lets me renew my domain for 10 years at a time, so it's definitely not something that all registrars do.
Ummm.. then maybe get a better registar? It's not like there aren't many to choose from.