"and therefore must eventually be harmonised. This is the prime directive of the project"

That's not a very good prime directive.

Don't regulate things that don't need to be regulated, i.e. unless there is a very material benefit from it.

If the EU is concerned about WW3 level resiliency for these services, they can accomplish that themselves with a few cord, 'hardened' services that meet their criteria. For 'regular operations' it seems we're going quite well right now.

Unless there is a threat posed by these heretofore independent operators ... then I'm don't see any obvious material benefit here.

I'm wondering if somehow these entities could be compromised in a way that makes them a problem, more so than just 'going offline', in which case, maybe there are some benefits.

Not they cannot. A DNS request in China is not targeting a European root but a local one. And that can affect a European citizen.

Seems like it's the job of the 'EU citizen' to not use foreign services if they don't want to use services which are not consistent with their own regulatory standards.

Which is exactly what we're doing, via our government (which is of, by and for the people).

Umm idk if I put 1.1.1.1 as my DNS which root is it targeting? The one in China? Or if I put 0.0.0.0 (IP of EU run DNS server backed by EU run root) then is it still China?

There is a simpler solution rather than enforcing EU oversight over root DNSes.

Cloudflare is one of the private operators of root servers mentioned in the article so you would be using the F root server.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/f-root/

Hence why I said 0.0.0.0 as a root DNS created and operated by EU