https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/dns-amplification-ddos-attack/

You should never expose a DNS server publicly. Connect to your VPS through a VPN like Wireguard.

Do you have a second DNS server configured in Windows which it could use as a fallback?

Dual-Stack is usually no problem, but going IPv6-only is a pain, because a suprising amount of services are v4 only. Even NAT64/DNS64 doesn’t help everywhere.

There is https://gitlab.com/flauncher/flauncher, which is working nicely

Yes, https://containrrr.dev/watchtower/ is a great tool. Used it myself for a whole now.