3.11 was released as stable two days ago. My almost-default Omnia on 3.11 loads the root hints fine, without anything about that in configuration. That’s how it’s meant to be. The path to default root hints is compiled in, and on Omnia it’s /etc/kresd/root.hints, included in the package AFAIK. I can’t see what’s happening in your case.
BTW, root hints behave differently than regular hints and should be handled by special commands if you want to replace them: hints.root*.