You may have missed the precursor discussion this past weekend, a walkthrough of setting up pihole on VPS:

Set up a cheap cloud hosted adblocker in an hour for $2.50 a month

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852109

Of particular added value there was mention of Android apps that can be setup to self-host an ad-blocking VPN / hosts filtering without rooting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853408

https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard

NetGuard is the first free and open source no-root firewall for Android.

ce4

Alas the plugin that does host-based blocking is not available in the play store version, it's/was a paid feature for the version on GH only. (edit: Don't know the current state though. remember from some time ago when I last checked it).

j_s

Sounds like this is still true.

Optionally block ads using a hosts file (not available if installed from the Play store)

I re-linked NetGuard as the most user-friendly, but https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66 was also mentioned.