I have a said expensive router, a Nighthawk, that will only advertise itself as the DNS and proxy requests. Unfortunately it's really bad at that and I was getting lots of lookup failures. Now I hardcode most of my devices to 8.8.8.8 .

I can totally see how they and other IoT vendors would want to do that. What boggles my mind is that so many people believe the feature implemented was "Use 8.8.8.8 and break otherwise so we can trojan our DNS into places" instead of "Hardcode 8.8.8.8 so it works in most cases".