Ask HN: Thoughts on Home Network Upgrades?

Hey all, seems like my router might be getting close to kicking the bucket after over 5 years. I've been doing some research on some possible upgrades for my home network, but think I could use some input and ideas.

I currently have a Pi-hole as the DNS for my router. That had an issue recently too. Are there reasonably priced home routers that can do DNS filtering like the Pi-hole? I heard of some using dnsmasq, but haven't found it mentioned in any of the router listings that I've been looking at. I kind of assume at least some of them have it but that maybe it's not a big selling point and doesn't get listed in the features.

I'm thinking about adding a VPN at the router level. How do people game with this config? I would like to exempt gaming traffic and most video steaming traffic. I think the video streaming and consoles should be easy to do since I can just whitelist that hardware using excluded static IPs since those are mostly dedicated to those tasks. However, for a PC I could be doing stuff that I want a VPN for and at another time using it for gaming.

Maybe I'm overthinking this since I've heard some people game on a VPN. Can anyone speak to that experience? Im guessing in some cases it's fine and others it's laggy high ping. I'm thinking of using Proton VPN.

The other option I was considering was setting the router to use a range of IPs for the random IP devices, then setting my computer IP at login - one user could be for gaming and set an IP outside of the random range (to avoid collisions) and have that IP defined as an exclusion in the VPN. Then have a second user I can log in as when I want to use the computer for other tasks where IP would be defined outside of the range for the randoms (still avoid collisions) but not have it listed in the exclusions in the VPN.