What’s your problem with PiHole? Why do you need Cron jobs? I’m quite happy with PiHole. If you like, I can try to help you with some questions there.
Thanks for the insights. Thanks for your effort. And thanks for providing a new home on the internet. I really appreciate it.
And as for the why: I keep a small amount of Passworts physical at home or in my mind (like 5 or so). All others are in the password save and always random pass phrases. I also separate password files by purpose e.g. business, customers , private etc. I think that’s a same thing to do to keep accounts save.
KeePassXC on macOS and KeePassium on iOS. Synced with my self hosted Nextcloud instance.
In Pi-Hole you can define groups and add devices to them and then assign block lists to those groups. I’m not sure if all your use cases are covered. Maybe you can check their discourse to see if others have found a decent way. The web interface is quite nice from my point of view.
https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/block-internet-access-at-certain-times/12036