Yes, but also less so every day. Google has already figured out that they should serve Youtube ads and content from the same servers to limit the ability of DNS based ad filtering.

DNS filtering is a cat-and-mouse game that DNS filtering tools will eventually lose. Don't get me wrong, I love Pihole and have used it for a while, but I know that I'm on the losing side of this battle.

Network level ad-blocking doesn't work very well.

Privoxy (and Proxomitron before it) were doing it 20 years ago, but never caught on because they're a PITA to setup and can't handle inline adverts. Pi-hole is new, but it's even more work to setup, and suffers the same limitations.

And as ad-blocking has become more popular the problems only gotten worse. It's unusual that I see any ads any more, but when I do it's always in an inline div or span with a "random" id or class name, essentially invisible to pi-hole.

Pi-hole and similar solutions are crude compared to uMatrix. I wish that weren't the case. If we didn't have to rely on browser extensions for fine-grained control then alternative browsers like qutebrowser could become more than just toys.

One of my concerns is that DNS over HTTP(s) is really just a way to obfuscate DNS queries from the oversight of network level ad blockers like Pi Hole, AdBloka et al.

I have a Pi-hole and use uBlock; when I turn off uBlock and use the Pi-hole alone, a ton of ads still seem to come through. This is with the default blocklists (StevenBlack, MalwareDomains, sysctl.org, zeustracker.abuse.ch; about 8 total). Maybe I'm not adding enough lists, but "out of the box" it doesn't seem to cut it.

The new trend to slip through is hiding behind cloudflare. I see cloudflare urls being loaded within cloudflare URLs to obfuscate the source of ads and scripts

So this only blocks/matches known domains? That isn't nearly as useful as to what uMatrix/uBlock allow, such as filtering by resource type. E.g. you may want to disable all JS by default, which uBlock allows.

setting up a dedicated linux box to run pi-hole is a lot harder than installing a browser extension (but I agree it's awesome)