Have you looked at privacy guides knowledge base? The site is informative and tailored to beginners.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/

Ill throw Netbird in as a choice. FOSS, privacy respecting, and doesn’t require port forwarding.

You going to get a lot better advice posting on the pihole forum discourse.pi-hole.net

If your just browsing you could try using a reddit frontend, such as a redlib instance like redlib.catsarch.com

Verify their hash signature.

The opposite happened for me. Separating out Google services to another profile made me realize how little I need to interact with Google Play Services to use my phone on a daily basis.

I think the article was an interesting read. From a laymen’s perspective it felt like it got to side tracked by the examples mentioned in the intro (the initial list example and signal vs mls).

When I initially started reading I had thought there would be more information for how someone that is new to a subject could spot and differentiate these lists from the ones the author says the article isn’t about without being an expert.

Instead it feels like the title of the article ends up being more of a sub header and the sub header “How Do You Compare Signal to MLS?” was actually a more appropriate title.