>>fanf2+(OP)
It's bit curious that traditionally UNIX systems did not run local DNS resolver daemons and instead the resolv.conf (and nsswitch.conf) persisted for so long. In addition to potentially simplifying configuration, having a daemon would allow system-wide dns caching, something I'd imagine would have been especially valuable back in the days of slow networks. Unix has daemons for everything else so that's why it feels odd that name resolution got baked into libc