Unless you drive by car and say you are in 'transit'. Nobody in Schengen will/can stop you (or even check). With the exception of the border police having reasonable doubt you are a border commuter/worker.
Agree with this sentiment. When you're in the moment, it may feel as if you're loosing time. But failing should be the best school you ever have. You might had to do research on X or train some aspects of your development skills etc. You always take that with you. The experience itself, is never lost.
Prefer Signal myself too. It's a bit hard to switch over from WhatsApp and tried to use it at least with my spouse. One feature that Telegram and WhatsApp miss, is being able to send yourself a message. On Signal you can do this and it's very convenient for taking notes, sending passwords (laptop <--> phone) and for saving bookmarks. I used to share interesting bookmarks from HN to my email, but that quickly got cumbersome to sort out.
I'm going to assume that Apple will do everything to maintain their cut. Even if what you said would be possible, I would expect Apple to update their terms of service to abolish it.
Check your Nextdns.io logs and see what gets blocked. Then add the blocked domain (or the whole root domain) to the Whitelist. The whitelist always overrides any blocklist entry.
On a Xiaomi device myself. Recently I've setup Nextdns.io to resolve all the DNS requests through it. Very frequent callbacks to Xiaomi servers for tracking. Blocked a bunch of them now, but it's half a solution.
I started using Joplin recently - https://joplinapp.org/ - it has a browser plugin. It can store things locally and then you can use the search engine to look up your bookmarks, together with your notes, tags.