context, please.

i am setting up DHCP with AdGuardHome

If you can share, what did you choose as an upstream nameserver: your own recursive unbound or Cloudflare onion service or something else? All of them suck in various ways; for me, Cloudflare onion service accessed from multiple VPSes and proxied to a locally running CoreDNS with a relaxed cache works adequately reliably.

nothing fancy besides added mDNS resolution, i am using Quad9 unfiltered as the upstream (quic)

The path of least resistance 🌚 That means at least query exposure, associated with whatever IP it's accessed. I wish there were more private ways to do that reliably. There are some experimental ODoH servers, but I didn't make any research.

yeah cloudflare has one, but i hate cloudflare apple uses it internally (relay)