But what advantages does this have? the replication is arbitrary and unreliable, if a TLD server messes up for a minute? ok no problem, if more?

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/q38p8x/entire_clu...

I wouldn't call several layers of caching "distributed", there is still ever only X owning servers for each record, and usually all X are owned by the same group