You misunderstood what I said. DNS is certainly a decentralized protocol and obviously not at all necessarily DIY. That’s all I was speaking to. Decentralized can be that simple.

> DNS is certainly a decentralized protocol

What you originally said could be interpreted as either DNS-the-system or DNS-the-protocol. I assumed the former, since that seemed more likely.

Sure, the protocol could be used without the resolver hierarchy, but I would argue that's not a useful way to think about it, since it won't happen in practice.