Using Adguard Home and DNSMasq, Any point to Unbound DNS?

[JMini]

A lot of good info here. Thanks, all.
I'm located in the US and Verizon is my ISP. I'm pretty sure they mine DNS and sell the data. No GDPR here. CloudFlare has a good reputation for privacy. But any unencrypted DNS will be snooped by Verizon.
I don't care about "intelligence". I'm a nobody home user. They're gonna get what they get. I'd rather just not be snooped on by my ISP and have it sold to advertisers.
So, if I let Unbound use the authoritative servers it has compiled in, it's sending those requests in the clear over port 53 that can be seen by anyone along the way. Using DOH/DOT, it's at least hidden until it gets to CloudFlare/OpenDNS. Then I'm relying on their privacy promises. I get that part.

Thanks for the whole explanation of how the stepped approach to DNS resolution works. I thought there were these centralized DNS repositories that just served up the whole thing. Not org, then opnsense.org, then forums.opnsense.org.
Maybe I'll so some reading on the details of DNS. No idea it was that segmented.

[meyergru]

Quad9 are located in Switzerland and seem to be ok:

https://quad9.net/about/foundation-council/

1.1.1.1 also seems O.K. to me (and it is by far the fastest DNS resolver I know of).