Trust me, I fully get it. You are trying to be pedantic and “technically correct,” Um Actually style. I am speaking from the perspective of this sub (privacy and enhancing it). You are your network. You are not a middleman in the context of yourself or your network. You are not losing privacy in relation to yourself. That’s being ridiculous. It’s like saying “I didn’t cook this steak at my house, um actually, my stove and pan did. Well, they (and I and the butter/oil) were the middleman. Let’s not forget the fire. Etc.” Again, ridiculous.
Also, you’re right in that you have to ask a DNS server to resolve a name to an IP. But in this context, DNS servers ask the root name server. Those DNS servers are the middlemen, rootname is not. With Unbound and recursive, you are asking the authoritative root name server. They are not a middleman to themselves…they are the authority in DNS (it’s in the name). Also, Unbound as Recursive does answer the question of OP which was “what DNS to use?” When you configure a recursive resolver, you don’t (shouldn’t) change it away from the root nameservers and insert a middleman (someone/something you don’t control), and it doesn’t do it by default. OP was clearly asking about non-authoritative DNS servers to use aka “should I use Quad9, CloudFlare, etc?” And my answer was…none. Cut out those middlemen that don’t need to be there/asked (which takes away some privacy as you’re asking a person who doesn’t need asked), and ask the root nameservers yourself via Unbound recursively.
You seem to be stuck talking from the perspective of the client/PC. Next, are you gonna say “you’re not actually going to the site. You’re going to the switch, then the router, and a firewall, maybe traversing a DMZ, could be a proxy in there, then going through the core backbone routers of the internet, down into their network. Of course, if there’s a VPN in there, that changes things. Let’s not forget the middleman of your own NIC and CPU, not to mention the keyboard, motherboard, mouse, etc. Oh, of course fiber and cabling. Those are all middlemen.” Do you see how fundamentally ridiculous that is?