Is this substantially better than using ublock origin? I feel like my browsing experience is pretty good right now, and I'm uncertain what the benefits to upgrading are.
One way I've noticed the difference with and without pihole is that most apps on my phone become ad free when I connect to my home network. On most phones ad blockers exist, but those are just another layer of software that needs to be woken when the phone wakes from deep sleep.
I use pihole + uBlock in Firefox with tracking protection (on both mobile and PC) for my browsing, but Pihole saves me the effort of finding a reliable Android system ad blocker that's reasonably power efficient. I'm considering also using it on my laptop as a VM to get the same features on the go.
It really comes down to where you want to block ads.
Also, I don't know if Ublock Origin actually blocks the ad requests or just prevents them from loading, but if it's the latter, then you can reduce traffic with Pi-hole as well.
But piHole can be used for blocking device telemetry. From installed softwares is the OS itself