Just did 2+ hours of fascinated clicking as if I found a new part of Wikipedia, mainly because I assumed the "one way trip" to the ocean was a euphemism for what happened to the Titan submersible.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with re-using an expired domain.
I'd even go as far as recommending it for hosting similar content to the previous owner's; in the same concept as cafes closing and re-opening under new ownership.
It's the site-squatters, domain-traders and link-farmers that shouldn't be allowed to take over existing URIs.
That test is actually funny, in a good way; like how you said you got those links in the first place on the about page is pretty much what any experienced web dev finds out day-to-day.
Most sites I sent to it came back with plenty of false positives, mainly because htaccess rewrites resolve the URIs as query string IDs and returned empty pages with "Sorry, but the information you're looking for doesn't exist..."
So yeah, I guess we're actually not that different after all.