You don’t cut the middle man, you create the middle man with Unbound. And Unbound needs to ask other DNS servers on the internet to resolve DNS queries. Your local DNS server can’t just magically know which IP is behind a domain like for example google.com. It needs to ask other DNS servers that know the answer. So unless you’re not using hyperlocal you will always need a DNS server on the internet to browse the web.
With Unbound, you can set it up as a recursive DNS server. Hence, cutting out the middle man. https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/
You don’t cut the middle man, you create the middle man with Unbound. And Unbound needs to ask other DNS servers on the internet to resolve DNS queries. Your local DNS server can’t just magically know which IP is behind a domain like for example google.com. It needs to ask other DNS servers that know the answer. So unless you’re not using hyperlocal you will always need a DNS server on the internet to browse the web.
Here’s an explanation by Cloudflare.