DNS is utilized for many things besides looking up web sites (and consequently ads on web sites). DNS was used for many things etcd was invented to solve, and still is by many. Adblocking is kidstuff; the bearded, motorcycle riding, gun-shooting, jumping out of airplanes and hanging off of rocks jackals use a "DNS firewall" (just posted this the other day): https://www.dnsrpz.info/ and Dnstap for application-level DNS logging.

Absolutely — DNS goes way beyond just resolving websites. It’s been used for service discovery and coordination long before tools like etcd came along, and still is in many systems today. Adblocking is one use case, but DNS firewalls (like RPZ) and logging frameworks such as Dnstap show how powerful DNS can be at the infrastructure level. Thanks for sharing the link — it’s a great reminder that benchmarking speed is only one piece of the bigger DNS picture.