But is also very rare that you ask directly for domain name resolution in the first place; you are usually instead using something directly or indirectly that h

But is also very rare that you ask directly for domain name resolution in the first place; you are usually instead using something directly or indirectly that happens to be remote, and that eventually happens to have a punycode encoded non-ascii hostname or top level domain. But there's no garantee that you (or the libraries, or the libraries that your libraries use...) are only handling the ascii punycode. I can count on my fingers the number of places I invoked manual DNS lookups inside production code.