I discovered this by running unbound – a DNS server – locally (block some unwanted hosts and do dns over TLS). I guess the rest of the story is pretty obvious; having your default dns server not being able to resolve because you're trying to verify it – since you cannot resolve your verify hostname – is obviously Not Great. As you can imagine, there is no waiting in the world that fixes this. I couldn't kill (-9) the process either; had to reboot into safe mode, rename the binary and switch the default dns on the network.