I may be a crazy old bastard but I have never used an ad blocker. I just use plain simple blacklists. Too many ads or obtrusive ads go on the list and I just don't see those sites anymore. Otherwise I'm fine with ads.
I assume you're adding the blacklist into your host file? How big is your block file? I remember one think that finally pushed me to use pihole and adguard a few years ago was due to my large host file causing >1s dns lookup time. Moving to pihole improved performance significantly in my case. Not sure if OS these days can handle large host file without huge performance impact though.