PiHole-over-Tor is solid for people who can tolerate the tradeoffs, but that’s not what most people need and it’s not what the article was about. And it still doesn’t change the core point: PiHole + Tor is an anonymity stack, not a filtering and telemetry management stack for mixed device home networks.
Most people are running phones, smart TVs, IoT junk, consoles, work laptops, and devices that melt down the moment DNS latency leaves the building. They need reliability and filtering, not anonymity from the resolver. That’s a different job.
This isn’t a one is better argument. It’s apples and oranges.
AdGuard and NextDNS solve a different problem entirely. They give you per-device policy control, telemetry blocking, encrypted DNS, parental rules, logs, statistics, and custom filtering. Tor doesn’t do any of that. PiHole doesn’t do most of that either.
When people do need anonymity from the resolver, I point them to a separate isolated Tor lane (like my ZeroSentinel Shadow setup) or a per-device solution like Whonix or Tails. That keeps anonymity where it belongs without breaking the entire home network.