I've been using Nova for years on various different phones. My wife has used it on all her Pixel phones for a while now too. I haven't noticed any real difference in performance between devices, it always feels responsive to me.
I love how many settings and options there are, you can tweak just about anything. Lots of gesture options (double tap, swipe, two finger swipe, etc) that can be assigned to just about anything. I only use swipe up to open the app drawer and swipe down to expand notifications, but you can also assign them to open any app or even like a Tasker shortcut.
I bought a router that supports OpenWRT, and then installed AdGuard right on my router