That's completely correct. In order the node tries it's inbuilt knowledge of the network, the falls back to DNS seed nodes to discover peers, then falls back to

That's completely correct. In order the node tries it's inbuilt knowledge of the network, the falls back to DNS seed nodes to discover peers, then falls back to hardcoded nodes if all of those fail. If no single peer can be contacted the node is dead in the water, and needs manual intervention to help get bootstrapped.