If you look at the press releases of various orgs that run the internet, you can see them praise the fact that now they run root server X in city Y, as if that magically makes everyone in city Y get all the relevant resolutions from the local server X, instead of going 200ms across the oceans and lands to other continents for resolutions.

Similarly, the zones of some geographical domain names, like .ru, are being mirrored not just within Europe, but also, for example, in Hong Kong, which is no more, no less, but is about 300ms away from central Europe, since the traffic is often crossing the two oceans on each way.

Doesn't all of this negatively affect DNS performance? Isn't it more of a liability to have a diverse pool of geodispersed authoritative servers, especially if your target audience is quite geographically concentrated?

Perhaps a better question is, are there any DNS resolvers that use something better than the naive round-robin for choosing which authoritative server to contact?