One important note is that there’s actually a couple different kinds of DNS servers; Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google Public DNS are examples of recursive resolver

One important note is that there’s actually a couple different kinds of DNS servers; Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google Public DNS are examples of recursive resolvers. These resolvers do what is described in this post, which is to say, recursively resolve a DNS request using authoritative DNS servers. And authoritative DNS servers are in the hierarchy observed here, starting with the root name servers, the TLDs, and then any number of delegated authoritative name servers for specific zones. (I’m sure there is a limit to how many you can practically have, either due to protocol limitations or simply because recursive resolvers will give up.) The reason why public recursive resolvers are unreliable when records change is because they cache answers according to the TTL, recursively. If you always use the authoritative servers to walk the query, though, you effectively sidestep this, since authoritative servers are the ones that actually store the records. (In the past it was also common for operating systems to default to caching DNS records, but even though it is definitely beneficial for performance, I think a lot of them have stopped, for the sake of making things less confusing. You can potentially improve your web browsing experience by installing a caching DNS server locally to your machine or network!)