This is just a DNS filter. Why is it a big deal? DNS filters sort of work, but they're not new or magic. They trigger some ad-blocking detectors when the ads don't load.
Easy to run at home with a web-based GUI for whitelisting, blacklisting and such. I like this tool a lot, personally, and it helps me feel better about keeping the family safe(r) online at home.
Agreed, it's been really nice to run at home. Took about an hour to set up from a diskless Pi I had sitting around, to a fully running system. Maintenance has been zero so far, and haven't had any downtime or anything.
The best part was when I first fired up the web interface and saw that it had already blocked 14 requests after hardly being up for more than 5 minutes. Nobody was home at the time, so it was kind of a wake up call to see idle devices reaching out to potential ad servers.
I was amazed at how much it was blocking on my Roku device hooked up to my TV. I ended up having to whitelist a few things in order for it to work, but it's blocking ads there too.
If you need something more powerful you can have a similar setup with Privoxy. I have a script[1] that regularly downloads the adblock lists and converts them into filter/action files for Privoxy plus some custom rules.
It's faster than a browser plugin and every device on the LAN can use it. It has a somewhat antiquated web UI and writing the rules it's not particularly user-friendly but it's working really well for me.
I used Privoxy since the days it was called Internet Junkbuster (90's), but got rid off it half a year ago, or so. It just does not filter enough anymore. Most ads came through. uBlock Origin (Firefox) gives much much better results. Privoxy is anti-innovative, as hell. Where are the regular updates to the filter-lists, like with all the other tools? Or sharing them in a cloud? Still no javascript injection/inline-execution in order to satisfy the complex Javascript ads? Still all being based on regular expressions? Before HTML5 we had ten years of XHTML, that could have been xpath'ed, xslt'ed, used for filtering. Now we have nodeJS. None of these modern technologies get used. It's still C and regex).
Nobody is making a "big deal" about it[0]. What they did was wrap something well known up into a relatively easy to install "package". They're not claiming this is new or magic, just simple.
