Also, to be clear, I am not saying it is not possible there is another way to do this beside
/etc/hosts.
What I am saying is that I have been doing this for many decades (since before the Internet was commercial), and some orgs I have worked as their lead network systems engineer are very huge, and everyone types the FQDN to get to hosts, routers, hubs and switches on network, and when they want or need short one name aliases, we always use
/etc/hosts and we have never had a problem, ever.
Maybe I'm just a "simple" kind-of-guy because I like to keep things simple and so they work cleanly and without problems.
If you have 100 servers or 200 and they all need one word "short cuts" to get to a FQDN, just create one file and distribute it to all who need it. That is how we have always done it.
I guess some try the "append it automatically", but frankly, I have seen that method (many years ago) have problems, so that is not how we did it; so I'm telling you want works, for sure. Sometimes keeping things simple works very good