You seem to be not addressing my main point, which is, once we are confident we have a network/connectivity issue, what is the benefit of now focusing on the outcomes of DNS queries? How does that help us at this point, when we know that DNS is not working for us in large part due to not being able to reliably connect to the endpoint itself?

In regard to an endpoint out of our control, once we demonstrate we cannot connect to it or serious connectivity problems in general, "is the service (that the endpoint provides) up?" is not a question that we need or should be trying to answer at that point.

That's cool though, if you want, you can just keep doing digs to an endpoint that is degraded from a network perspective, while I keep trying to troubleshoot why we have packet loss to the endpoint..