Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig nerfed.net. NS
Answer
nerfed.net. 4 NS cory.ns.cloudflare.com.
nerfed.net. 4 NS barbara.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0