I disagree with this. Separating lookup from connect(2) or sendmsg(2) is cleaner. If an application doesn't care about the difference, most people are using higher level APIs built on top anyway, and most of those will provide a quick way to hide DNS details from you.

Absolutely not.

You can have sockets without DNS. You can pick whatever strategy you want when there are multiple A records. You can use SRV records instead. And most importantly imo, it mirrors the listening API.

By who? I haven't seen this argument before.