In this case trying way to hard to be the good guy is leading them towards another type of bad

Overcompensate much?

If you form your understanding on topics you don’t understand based on what “gatekeeping morons” think or do, you are going to be perpetually misinformed

You can use a second router and pass through the WAN. It’s a bit complicated to explain in a comment, but it’s also not too difficult. Is your ISP ATT?

NextDNS and pihole serve the same purpose and are redundant. Personally I prefer NextDNS but it wouldn’t make sense in ops meme

Pihole is a great project, but it is objectively less capable than uBlock Origin.

That is not a criticism of the software. It is just a fundamental fact that DNS based adblockers are less powerful, and less granular/precise than Browser based adblockers.

They do work well in combination though (the DNS level adblockers gives you moderately effective network wide blocking, and uBlock Origin gives you exceptional blocking but is limited to the browser.