Actually, it most cases I find it significantly beats what a normal in-browser adblocker will do. More importantly, it does this for my phone, etc.

But yes self-hosted ads, etc. won't be blocked. For that, there are other solutions.

Personally, I use both.

it's not really fair to compare it to an in-browser adblocker that way, especially since using them isn't mutually exclusive. PiHole blocks ads whether you are in a browser or not, an instant benefit for everybody on your WiFi network.

In fact, one of the best things about Pi-hole network wide blocking is the removal of those 5 to 10 second otherwise unskippable ads in apps.

Exactly this. Ads in places like news apps disappear, a big plus for pihole.

Absolutely. Defense in depth; Pi-hole will cover devices that you can't install an ad-blocker on while the ad-blocker will cover some edge cases where Pi-hole can't do it.

It should never be considered an "or" situation; you want "both" as much as possible.

Watching videos with Javascript turned off, there are no ads.

Google tries to force users to turn on JavaScript by needlessly making the YouTube website "require" JS to be turned on to play videos.

However it is easy to play the videos without using JavaScript using just basic HTML.

Example

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23076239

there seems to be a solution: https://github.com/kboghdady/youTube_ads_4_pi-hole

a lot of in browser ad blockers are based on url and css selector patterns. Meaning that if the developer updates the site which changes the dom, the ad blocker may not work.