[aix1]

> Google also runs their own public DNS servers which afaik Chrome defaults to.

The statement that Chrome does not honour the networking stack's DNS settings does not agree with my observational data. I run pi-hole DNS and Chrome absolutely fails to load domains blacklisted there.

[ev1]

This is configurable, the default is to use the default network stack.

Settings > search for Use secure DNS for DNS-over-TLS.