I should clarify I wasn’t a upper level sys admin managing those servers, I just used them or maintained accounts being a rank and file technician
While I get the fundamental concept of DNS as a phonebook for your IPs. I am not sure why it is joked around if something goes haywire or someone breaks something.
Is it because if you get no DNS, people can’t log in through their AD accounts, browse the Internet?
Afaik DNS is a bit of a rabbit hole topic, maybe that’s why people joke about it due to DNS being this “No one really knows how this magic name matching box works”?
Please correct me, I’d genuinely like to know why this is prevalent from you guys.
In addition to the other comments which more directly address your question, DNS has been / can be used to exfiltrate data from “secure” networks. Search “dns data exfiltration” in your favourite search engine and you’ll get several high quality articles. Typical mitigations might be to limit which DNS servers your network can contact, restrict packet sizes to the bare minimum which valid use would have and so forth.