Yes, at some point CoreDNS was actually a forked webserver doing DNS.
This blog posts detail some of the early history of CoreDNS.
Pondering if I should create someting ala Caddy, but then for DNS. I didn’t have a name, so it was “Caddy DNS” (or Daddy as some point): https://miek.nl/2016/march/10/caddy-dns/.
This idea was good enough that I actually tried it out, resulting in the first queries answered by “Caddy DNS”: https://miek.nl/2016/march/14/first-light/.
Started to believe this “Caddy DNS” might actually be a thing I would work on: https://miek.nl/2016/march/17/caddy-dns-update/
Officially announcing CoreDNS: https://miek.nl/2016/march/18/announcing-coredns/ and dropping the name “Caddy DNS”.