> To avoid ndots issues, the most straightforward solution is to have at least five dots in our hostname. Fluent-bit is one of the biggest abusers of the DNS requests. ... As it now has five dots in the domain, it doesn’t trigger local search anymore.

But it wasn't DNS. DNS didn't break. The protocol didn't break. Not even issues with the CoreDNS or dnsmasq implementations.

The culprit was ndots (why did Kubernetes arbitrarily choose five dots) and the general way that Kubernetes (ab)uses DNS.