"Who knows, maybe you've had some of my cooking, donald"

I'm not sure exactly why, but I think that could break him.

As far as I can tell, it's fraud and has nothing to do with copyright.

Seems a bit stingy.

Sadly, I can not explain this to you any better.

DNS leaks normally occurs when your OS decides to use the wrong interface for DNS queries. It's not magic, sorry.

There is a decent explanation here: https://www.top10vpn.com/what-is-a-vpn/vpn-leaks/

By doing a traceroute to the DNS IPs, you only confirm that traceroute goes through the VPN interface, not your DNS resolution.

Smoking. First nicotine and then weed.

Currently working on my addiction to junkfood, sugar and general overeating.

Still highly addicted to caffeine and possibly in denial about a sex addiction. But I think I'll keep those two.

Looks like stupid fun. Trailer

I'm cancelling my family subscription the moment I catch Spotify randomly trying to put AI stuff in my playlist.

Traceroute won't show if you leak DNS requests outside of your VPN. (Unless you coincidentally also leak traffic, but then you're pretty much just not using your VPN).

To confirm you'll need to analyze your traffic-flow using a tool like tcpdump or Wireshark and check the source and destination for DNS traffic. If you see incoming DNS responses on an interface that is not your VPN-adaptor or maybe a loopback interface then you're probably not tunnelling DNS through the VPN.

To answer the question in the headline: Regular DNS is unencrypted and quite easy to snoop on, so any node on the route between you and the DNS server will be able to read it if not using a VPN (i.e. DNS leak). Not sure what you mean by adversary, but it's not like anyone on the internet can see your traffic. The DNS server may log your request and if you're not on VPN, your IP address may be logged too.