Self-hosted alternatives to cloudflare/next secure dns servers? - eviltoast

I’ve seen a lot of threads here about self-hosting DNS from people that host their own services, but nothing beginner-friendly on hosting your own DNS server just for privacy. It seems to me that your biggest privacy risk as a consumer is your ISP snooping on your DNS requests, and replacing your ISP with another mega-corp doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. Does anyone know of an easy way to spin up your own secure DNS server? Something like a digital ocean droplet that’s idiot proof, fire-and-forget, and not too expensive?

Edit: mirroring is fine, but just running a proxy doesn’t seem much better to me since you’re still creating a paper trail for all of your browsing back to a server you’re renting, but I’d be happy if someone could explain why I’m wrong about that.