I use iOS, but the iron grip Apple has on its walled garden puts advanced users at great disadvantage.

You want a privacy-friendly browser like Firefox? No, you are only allowed to use a Firefox skin on good old Safari instead.

You want local ad/tracker blocking? No way, you are allowed to use a VPN instead, and hope it doesn't sell your data too.

You want to jailbreak and stroll outside the corral? Better hope iOS keeps having zero-days, because there's no official way, and Apple actively works against the unofficial way.

Could you roll your own vpn to say your home where you have a a rpi set up as a pihole and your own adblocking dns like you could on android? (Common roll your own VPN's like Wireguard or OpenVPN)

That is exactly my point, these are not solutions, but workarounds we end up with. A sensible approach would be a local blocklist, which would save not only battery and bandwidth, but all the material resources needed for the workarounds.

I understand Apple will never implement this because ads and a captive audience are a crucial part of their business model; I just resent that Apple actively blocks people that want to implement this themselves.