[ryandv]

That's correct, "directly query the authoritative nameserver yourself" is precisely what dig +trace does.

> You still only will know that other resolvers will receive the desired answer eventually.

That's also correct. DNS is an eventually consistent system where if you stop updating the authoritative records, all resolvers will eventually converge to the latest answer once their cached records expire (presuming that they actually respect the cached records' TTLs as expected).