I thought the real red pill was Handshake (HNS).

You're not buying domains but instead are buying the TLD itself and then create domains on the TLD.

I haven't read up on it that much but their pitch of "stop renting the thing in front of the TLD, own the actual TLD" is pretty cool.

https://handshake.org/

https://www.namebase.io/

So if I type bankofamerica.com, does ENS respond with DNS controlled by whoever purchased it on the chain, or does it first lookup at verisign's root before going to ENS?

Can regular DNS records (A, AAAA) that resolve to an IP actually be used with ENS? And then are there browsers or browser plugins that support .eth as a TLD? As far as I can tell the ENS ecosystem only has IPFS (and wallet) address support. It's frustrating because ENS seems like the obvious answer for decentralized domains but I've never seen it used for anything but vanity names for ETH wallets and static IPFS sites.