alt Hacker NewsI would argue the contrary - most home routers are running a DNS server of some kind. They forward to upstream, but will resolve local names like your printer and whatnot.
dnsmasq is the defacto tool on these embedded devices for dhcp+dns. probably a billion deployments. it's up there with sqlite for most used tech.
IIRC a resolver is what people would think of as a DNS server only it's not an authority for any domains. Like you said, they're used to get load off of authoritative servers and are very common. I think dnsmasq is mentioned explicitly in the O'Reilly locust book but it's been a while.