I put a link to[1] in the article, which was previously discussed here[2] with a correction to that article. Basically there's a 2 byte length header on TCP DNS responses, limiting the payload (i.e. the DNS message inside) to 64 KiB.

  [1]: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/dns-size.html#:~:text=65536%20bytes%20DNS%20payload%20%2B%202%20bytes%20size%20%3D%2065538%20bytes
  [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39257147

Cool!

For the bad apple one; I tried something like that, it works if you're directly querying the authoritative DNS server, but if a cache is involved the records will be re-ordered by randomisation (even in some cases with TTL=0). That's why I ended up doing this as a single very long record, because then it can be cached without worrying about reordering.