> It wasn't broken, so it did not need fixing / rewriting.

DNS has been broken on most linux systems for a long time. If you read the ubuntu mailing list post, this is the problem they are solving:

* On servers, cloud images etc. we did not have any local DNS server. Configured DNS servers (via DHCP or static configuration in /etc/network/interfaces) were put into /etc/resolv.conf, and every program (via glibc's builtin resolver) directly contacted those.

   This had the major drawback that if the first DNS server does not
   respond (or is slow), then *every* DNS lookup suffers from a ~ 10s
   timeout, which makes every network operation awfully slow.
   Addressing this was the main motivation for the blueprint. On top
   of that, there was no local caching, thus requesting the same name
   again would do another lookup.

I don't particularly care HOW they fix that issue (local dnsmasq/unbound/resolvd) but to pretend that there isn't a problem is sticking your head in the sand.