Another vote for using GrapheneOS, which has had the option to disable or redirect this check to their own servers.
I wonder if Google strongly desires to harvest this "connectivity check traffic" aka "ping data", and in turn, the real reason for assigning this bug WONTFIX.
Unforunately the leaked DNS queries might also be hitting ISP and other nefarious DNS servers.
This is a pretty minimal leak. I'm glad that the article is very clear about that. Given the somewhat recent iOS VPN leak reports, it would have been valuable for this article to state that their investigation was or was not motivated by those reports.