And the pool's automated management infrastructure prunes misbehaving hosts pretty quickly (e.g. not responding, out of sync, etc). See "servers in the pool" and "servers currently not in the pool" here:
Well I'm just reporting the reality that the keyservers are down when I want to use them, almost without fail.
I suspect that gpg isn't trying multiple servers in the pool but only trying the first A record it finds. I've had to edit hosts to select a functioning key server in the pool many times.
Before I learned about the SKS Keyservers pool, I had my "keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu" in my ~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf, and that never failed for me unless I was in a strangely firewalled environment. Maybe try that?
https://sks-keyservers.net/
And the pool's automated management infrastructure prunes misbehaving hosts pretty quickly (e.g. not responding, out of sync, etc). See "servers in the pool" and "servers currently not in the pool" here:
https://sks-keyservers.net/status/