The quality of life improvement of having pihole was minimum. I would rather just use cloudflare or google's DNS. What value prop pihole provides I have no idea. I think that is what I feel about many if not all privacy focused tooling this way.
I underestimated how prolific the idea of tracker - first engineering. Tracking (by the defintion of privacy advocate) is inherent in many if not most system. The privacy preaching that I have been subject to made me believe that privacy is a one button tool.
Whether open source or privacy, I feel like has very little net utility when you offset it by convenience or consequences. You can pay for YouTube premium or you can update the sideloaded app every other week.