gp Yeap this is absolutely right. Even a router level static DNS gets hijacked by my ISP, both at home and at work - all ISPs are mandated by my govt to do this, as part of their effort to censor the internet. Reddit, Vimeo, Tumblr, all blocked nationwide.
At home I have Pihole running on a separate machine locally dishing out DNS queries - so this is not a problem. But at work, I have no control over that and I rely on browsers like Brave to access the free internet. I'd rather not use VPN as it can be a hassle with content providers like Netflix.