While I'm not everybody, I think its decent and better than the default which is your ISP. Normally pointing directly at google or cloudflare does not hide it from your ISP. I actually just did this yesterday though not with a raspberry pi since I just care about my windows box for now and my router is not open enough to allow this. I think they recommend doing it on your router directly if possible. This helps with Android devices for instance which do not really let you set your DNS easily. I installed DNSCrypt for windows on my desktop and pointed at cloudflare. As others pointed out without a VPN, its only kinda helpful but I figure I don't need to share any more than I really need to with my ISP who I don't trust in general. Also I figure even with VPN anything that slips past the VPN for whatever reason is leaked less to my ISP.

Had an extra benefit of creating a log file of queries so I can see addresses that are being queried. I found NordVPN pinging random websites and wondering why? (To see if I'm blocked apparently)

I thought that dnscurve was the method to actually prevent domain snooping. Regardless, I think running your own authoritative dns which updates from root servers is the real way to go.

Unless you are using encrypted DNS, I'm not how that helps -- even using your own resolver, your ISP can sniff the content of the requests (though it might be a legal rather than a technical hurdle -- they can only legally monetise requests that go to their servers -- depending on jurisdiction?).

In the context of DNS, "authoritative" refers to the servers which hold the actual records for a domain.

I think the term you are looking for is a recursive resolver (one that will perform a full name resolution for a client).

Your traffic still has to go to those servers, so your ISP still can track the terminal server IP, can't it? (TOR, or tunneling aside)

An almost unlimited number of domains can be hosted off a single IP. That said, the SNI header can still be sniffed on an HTTPS connection.