The niche I'm aiming for is for people who just want to map hostnames to IP addresses. And note this isn't a commercial offering, just something I built for myself that I'm going to put up a website for and maybe some other people will find interesting. I do think I have some product-market fit because even among my dev friends, who are all quite talented, many of them have mentioned to me "yeah I threw bind9 on a server but decided I didn't hate typing IPs enough to actually set up and operate it".
I'm aiming for zero onboarding time and zero maintenance headache. You run a docker container, map the ports, and then there's a nice web UI that takes you the rest of the way.
The difference is huge in other ways, though. Configuration, operations, and maintenance of the BIND cluster is 20 fold more involved, and when things break, they can break in really confusing ways. Such is the world of computing though, the better something performs, the more places it has where you can mess it up.
That sounds pretty different from the audience they said they're targeting → "impatient homelabbers/SMB".
As another commenter points out though, the load you're talking about definitely sounds like something PowerDNS should handle without much problem. Given reasonably spec-ed, hardware and software that is.
It's used by some pretty big places:
Dnsmasq or PowerDNS weren't suitable?