They call it “dark traffic” - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.
Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.
Depends. Using some no-name dns server in Uzbekistan is likely not going to be easily reachable for your queries by your local government, if at all.
Then again, most of you don’t have queries over encrypted protocols anyway, so it’s an open book regardless of who your third-party is.
Best case if you’re a luddite, run a very highly recommended(by the fediverse) VPN, like windscribe or mullvad, and use their dns servers. Wireguard will encrypt the queries, and the vpn being supposedly trustworthy would put any cork in it otherwise.