None of these examples are of actual separate registration/ownership of a 3LD from the parent 2LD. Cloudflare owns the domain for myproject.pages.dev and hosts all the relevant infra. Not to say that there isn't a different entity represented by the 3LD than the 2LD but it's not exactly the same.
Also I would not consider the examples of tumblr and reddit to be relevant. A person's blog on myprofile.tumblr.org is still the tumblr organization. This would be true for reddit even if they didn't redirect. Reddit admins moderate content on all subreddits.
You can buy example.it.com on many registrars. Someone bought it.com and operates it like a TLD.
I see, that's a valid way to think of domain ownership.
When I read > I have been taught and tell my users to check the domain to verify a website is real.
I was thinking more of control of the content as "ownership" of the domain.