"Any entry level NOC Technician would know at this point"

I'm just a consultant who's been mucking about with networks for 30+ years. I'm sure your highly paid technicians will teach granddad a thing or two.

I note you switch between the OSI seven layer model and the ARPA four layer one with gay abandon. What are you doing at layers five and six?

We are all engineers here (whether chartered or not). The big question is - "Is the service up"? The service is DNS.

We go to the toolbox as any engineer does and use a tool for the job. I can hammer a screw into a wall or use a screwdriver - both will work but one will work effectively. I'll use dig but I imagine that a Windows jockey will use nslookup - both will work.

dig/nslookup fail? OK, now we look at connectivity issues - that's when ping comes in. However we do not own the DNS service and we cannot know that it is now dropping pings for some reason. Then we might play games with packet generators and Wireshark to try and determine what is going on. However, we do not run that failing service and all we can conclusively ... conclude is that for us, it is not working.

That's a far cry from Cloudflare DNS is down for everyone. We can only conclude that Cloudflare DNS is not working for me.