If I am employing a blocklist (created by adblock lean in this case) and I have 'no negative cache' set to 0 would the 'hits' in the blocklist be cached ?
openwrt 23.05.4
isn't the block list stored in RAM anyway ?
Probably but I have no idea which would be faster , search the cache or search the blocklist
so you're going to search RAM, instead of RAM, to (perhaps) save a u-sec ?
Hey I paid good money for those u-sec's and would like to save as many as possible 
Ask where you paid, on the normal internet sub-second DNS responses are acceptable, for cached records thats typically sub-millisec. usec was tongue-in-cheek joke, i.e in how many ethernet frames record is returned from cache vs switches that delay packets for dozen frame times...