My Own DNS Server at Home – Part 1: IPv4

If you decide not to use a forwarder, the DNS server will be truly independent.

The DNS server will contact the Root servers for the TLD namesevers of a domain, the TLD nameservers and then the actual authoritative nameserver for the particular domain.

No forwarder needed.

This means you bypass any DNS based filtering any DNS ‘forwarder’ may have in place.

I've always felt it makes sense to either use a forwarder you trust or just operate the root zone yourself. Going to the root zone dynamically is certainly the most technically correct, but if your goals involve either "independence" or "retaining some measure of the performance of using forwarders while still resolving things directly yourself" then you can just pull the root zone daily and operate your own root server https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files. Of course, IANA would rather you just use DNS as technically correct as possible because, well, that's what they exist for, but they don't attempt to roadblock operating your own copy of the root.

It's hard to go much deeper than that in practice as the zonefiles for TLDs are massively larger, massively more dynamic (i.e. syncing once a day isn't usually enough), and much harder to get ahold of (if it all, sometimes).

Regardless of how you go about not using a forwarder, if that's the path you choose then I also heavily recommend considering setting up some additional things like cached entry prefetching so recently used expiring entries don't get "hitches" in latency.