Oh, now I get it. Sorry, it was not obvious from the bug you've linked above - there it talked about a CNAME record referencing a bare hostname from a "proper"

Oh, now I get it. Sorry, it was not obvious from the bug you've linked above - there it talked about a CNAME record referencing a bare hostname from a "proper" (non-mDNS) domain name, a fairly weird use case I don't quite get. Yes, I do have a "proper" domain name for my LAN and my .local is for mDNS (although I don't think I've ever used it with short names, always foo.local explicit; and I use mDNS very infrequently) - guess which is why I haven't ever seen this behavior. Thank you for clarifying.