I might be misunderstanding something since I've never been a DNS expert, but wouldn't root servers only be able to block at the level of entire TLDs? Not to sa

I might be misunderstanding something since I've never been a DNS expert, but wouldn't root servers only be able to block at the level of entire TLDs? Not to say that governments couldn't be interested in doing that, but the flexibility seems limited (without e.g. requiring the root server to return government-approved servers and implementing the blocking on those servers).