I used to run unbound on my laptop just so I could configure stuff like forwarding zones with more precision than what a stub resolver normally gives you.

It can also be your validating DNSSEC resolver, which also satisfied that sort of morbid curiosity in me.

In the age of DoT and DoH, with endpoints hardcoded in browser binaries, that sort of thing has a lot less punch than it used to. Even back then Go binaries would start ignoring your nsswitch.conf…