It is not the only way. I use scan.io as one source of DNS data. No need for resolvers. The needed data can be saved to a zone file for a local authoritative server or a map file for a forward proxy. The later option requires no DNS at all.
I use cloudflared to do DNS lookups via Cloudflare’s Tor onion. It’s weak to vulnerabilities like this one, but it disassociates my DNS lookups from myself, and TLS certificates mitigate the risk of hitting spoofed sites.
The longer-term solution is to wait for DoT to become prevalent in authorative servers.
But, realistically, won’t you “leak” your IP anyway when you make your actual connection? I mean, why are you looking up things in the DNS if not to connect to them? And if you make a connection, you leak your IP.
If you’re not concerned with the other party’s DNS servers, but with the root servers and TLD DNS servers snooping on your queries, I think you’ll have to wait for QNAME minimization to arrive.
> The longer-term solution is to wait for DoT to become prevalent in authorative servers.
That has a serious deployment problem, far more so than ECH. It’s going to be years (and years and years) before a person can successfully do recursive resolution via TLS. Is that even on anyone’s roadmap?
Only if you have a local network of machines can you consider making one of these machines the resolver for the local network. A typical example of this might be your router. This machine should then not forward the DNS requests to some centralized resolver, it should resolve DNS queries itself.