You and GP are talking about completely different things. Yes DNS at its core it’s an elegant minimal protocol. But all the complexity comes from client side configuration before the protocol is even involved.

We have complexity like different kinds of VPNs, from network-level VPNs to app-based VPNs to MDM-managed VPNs possibly coexisting. We have on-demand VPNs that only start when a particular domain is being visited: yes VPN starting because of DNS. We have user-provided or admin-provided hardcoded responses in /etc/hosts. We have user-specified resolver overrides (for example the user wants to use 8.8.8.8 not ISP resolver). We have multiple sources of network-provided resolvers from RDNSS to DHCPv6 O mode.

It is non-trivial to determine which resolver to even start sending datagrams with that elegant minimal protocol.