For most app ads it's enough to set a DoT or DoH in the system that blocks ad domains. Android supports this with a settings menu entry, on Apple one needs a more "technical" solution I think (loading some XML?). Most VPN apps also support DNS enforcement.
Apps like YouTube are an exception, but there are other ways around that on Android.
I'm in the same situation myself. It's quite frustrating, since 2 weeks I have been told that "the ticket is open and the technicians will take a look soon". Not sure if stuff like this has a low priority since IPv6 works and it's not considered a total outtage? In Germany there are laws to grant consumers compensation in those cases, but I'll see if this counts soon enough.
One problem with the solution in this blog post is that various endpoints block datacenter IP ranges entirely or make you go through various captcha hoops, but no good way around that. Same for common VPN providers.
Since I wanted to fix this for my entire home network I also had to do this on my router - in those cases it's quite beneficial to have a non-standard device like an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, not sure how I would have set up all the Wireguard routing and nat rules on something like a FritzBox. The only downside is that the Router isn't powerful enough to handle a lot of connections, so I'll have to switch to IPSec which is supported by hardware offloading.
The official client is clunky and being electron on the desktop doesn't make it better. Messengers live and die on UX. Since it's an open protocol alternative clients exist of course, but are often not feature complete. Things are often slow, especially with large group channels with lots of messages.
If you host a server yourself - it's great that you can! - you'll try the official implementation, synapse — ...and discover that it's a resource hog. Things got a bit better with some streaming sync protocol or something like that, but last time I looked it up that was still experimental and the server is still a chonker. Again, alternative servers exist, again the problem with feature parity.
I feel like the protocol is bloated as well, but I didn't dive into it too much to have a good opinion on that.
When choosing a messenger, I go to Signal for security, to IRC for simplicity and to Telegram for UX. I never thought "Oh let's use Matrix"...
> I shudder to imagine what the next tier (cal us') costs.
There is no enterprise tier, instead you pay for any additional features you need. I.e. log streaming is 2$/month/user and SSH recording is 3$/month/user.
Apps like YouTube are an exception, but there are other ways around that on Android.