You bought your BF a Pi Zero? Wow! Awesome! Want to really surprise him? Get him a Pi 5 or a Le Potato.
Anyway, I run Pi Hole on my Raspberry Pi 5. It's totally awesome. It's one of those "geeze, why didn't I do this years ago." It makes network management so easy and flexible. I like its local DNS management.
Oh, I don't believe in using containers except for enterprise deployments. It's not useful on a small machine.
I've had a lot of pi's but the last one cracked the sdcard from heat. He doesn't see a use for one or I would give him one. I just got tired of ads on his network so did up the zero for him as something he doesn't have to maintain. He's a geek but doesn't bother with the Linux stuff and doesn't need much weird stuff at home like I do, apparently.
I've been using a dd-wrt router forever and pi hole for ages as well. I love pi-hole. I've caught so many weird things like a wifi extender pinging a time server constantly to display uptime. I can get stupid stuff like a floor mop that needs a firmware update and then block the MAC on my router.
I used to be a hard core windows user, but recently, I've gone hard core Debian and Ubuntu on clusters of SBCs. It all works, no nasty "upgrades" and i get good performance on low powered hardware.
I started with Linux back in 97 when my mom bought me a book with a Linux floppy in the back and I had a windows machine that I couldn't get the sound card functioning on. Never looked back.
I have a windows VM for some software that will not run in linux that I need and for gaming if it doesn't run on my steam deck.