I haven't used iodine, but this seems simpler. Iodine wraps requests with actual DNS requests. In this case that wasn't needed, because port 53 wasn't filtered at all. So all they needed was a simple proxy on port 53.
iodine automatically checks several modes a "simple" proxy on port 53 being one of them. If you're trying to sneak traffic through this kind of block, it is really the first tool to try.