The average user is not capable of running that themselves.

Further, DNS really benefits from caching as it scales up. As someone who runs my own resolver locally myself, I can attest to the sometimes long delay to resolve a hostname (requiring multiple external requests as the tree from root server is recursively queried).

I still run my own recursive resolver, I find it the best option overall, so ultimately I agree with your statement. But like anything there are trade-offs.