Do you really want to do forwarding in 2025 when there's all kinds of DNS censorship going on? I'd think you want your DNS server to do the recursive lookup itself.

If you're talking about "censorship from what the forwarder will resolve": You're free to pick any forwarders you'd like (in this case), not just ones that censor, and a forwarder is likely to perform better for most people's use.

If you're talking about "censorship of unencrypted DNS traffic in general": The censorship (or security/privacy risk or whatever your reason for caring it's unencrypted) doesn't care if you're sending traffic to a root nameserver for recursive resolution or traffic to a forwarder. What you need is something like encrypted DNS over another commonly encrypted channel that won't be blocked (e.g. DoH), which actually fits better with using a forwarder since most servers you'll recurse to don't support such transports.

Recursive resolution of public domains is really not as useful as it may sound for most people. The folks it perhaps helps the most are those interested in having the fewest external dependencies in their infrastructure. I have another comment about how to maximize that goal more than just resursing to the public root servers.