The last time I tried pi-hole, on an actual Raspberry Pi, was at least 4-5 years ago. While the ad-blocking/tracking was great I found the user interface extremely flakey. It would not persist changes to the whitelist properly, or if it did would not respect them. This broke a lot of tracking URLs for shopping/affiliate URLs.
Ad blockers are fairly sufficient these days so I haven’t bothered to investigate pi-hole again.
I use NextDNS and it’s all I need. UI is a joy, and yearly price is very affordable.
I have a UniFi network, load balancing dual wan (copper phone internet is by carrier pigeon so have starlink for speed) have run pihole for years now.
It sits on the a pi and works well with the UniFi kit.
I had a nasty shock when I was outside our network recently and got ads on the iPhone I was playing a card game on. Don’t often play games outside of home, but the intrusiveness of the ads were a real shock
My pihole is very ‘vanilla’ - I haven’t done any tweaking of lists. Every month or so I update the pi and pi hole and that is it.
Only once have I had to pause it (via the Admin menu) in order to use chat on a particular site.
The settings for dns in your dhcp server need to have the right ‘pecking order’. From memory there are clear instructions on the web for the two most common gateway/pihole/device combinations.
I can’t imagine life without it (or an alternative) now.
I use iCloud Private Relay since I already pay for iCloud+.
Isn’t that doing something else? (Increasing privacy vs hiding ads)
Because I run a self-hosted ADguard Home on Qnap NAS 
Interesting. I saw ADGuard and Technitium mentioned in my research, and there was a lot of forum/Reddit type posts with people saying that they like both better than Pi-Hole. Pi-Hole seems to get the most “talk” though. Any particular reason you went with it over Pi-Hole?
I set up NextDNS on my computers and it seems to be working well enough. No issues with it blocking anything I didn’t want to block. I was surprised to see most of what is blocking is Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
I am still going to do a Pi-Hole, just as a project, but I need to learn the Unifi stuff (firewall rules) first.
Crosstalk solutions have a good you tube post on UniFi, IoT vlans and firewalls. They also have one on setting up pi hole.
Worth a look (with a suitable ad blocker because google have made YouTube unwatchable otherwise)
Was going to post this, when i first got started with Rasberry Pi 4 a few years ago I kept burning up SD cards, after a firmware updated a few years ago it made booting from a USB Flash Drive possible in the last 3 yeers I have had 1 flash drive go bad. I use the Samsung FIT Flash Drives since they are a small form factor.
USB Stick? I connected a small USB SSD drive and it has worked ok so far (about 9 months).
(FWIW, USB flash sticks are very different than USB SSD drives.)