While folks may be thinking “number of queries” must mean it was performance concerns, the answer for Chromium was simpler: SRV records just didn’t resolve for a number of users. Neither do TXT records, for that matter ( https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html ). Early on in Chrome, it was discovered that attempting to resolve too many domains at once could cause 2Wire routers used by AT&T for DSL to lock up, requiring you to physically reboot, due to a bug in their port of dnsmasq.

Stories like this are stories like those mentioned in the post: everything on the Internet is awful, and you work with what you have and work around things by adding JPEGs of cats and silly session IDs (As TLS 1.3 does) and whatever it takes to “make it work”.

DoH/DoT, if it’s able to be adopted before ISPs and middleboxes ossify it with subpar implementations as part of their effort to avoid net neutrality ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/4/20898779/fcc-net-neutrali... ), is the first time in a long time that innovation and experimentation in DNS might happen again. This is why we see things like ESNI and SVCB ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-httpssvc ) having a chance at being deployed. At least, if clients can get there before the middleboxes ruin the party, like they’ve tried to do for QUIC.