Interesting. I do not know a lot about Home Assistant devices, but I thought they would just be communicating via standard WIFI + data encryption. I definitely didn't suspect there to be a whole new standard of wireless communication to that.
I understand the thing about downtime, running pihole myself. My setup is rather simple and centralized on purpose and I don't really mind the few minutes of "filtered DNS" downtime while pihole and pve are rebooting. As my UniFi Dream Router 7 is the firewall / gateway / DHCP server anyway, I just use pihole as primary DNS and 1.1.1.1 as secondary DNS. It's not filtering "bad domains" via DNS, sure, but I got adblock origin and other browser extensions dealing with whatever comes along anyway.
But, yeah, for redundancy and always-online-production-setups it's actually great having a secondary pve as a temporary stop-gap. Plus, it's a nice and kinda fancy setup, of course. Always appreciated in selfhosted :)