Pihole reloading in my case is probably mostly slow because of the hardware. That signal functionality to reload is pretty neat, though I think I disagree with the config files being the only thing specifying the servers behaviour exactly being a big advantage. In an environment using infrastructure as code it would probably be better to define DNS over the generic nsupdate API (e.g. with ansible or other equivalent tools) than having to write custom code to reload some config files that have to be regenerated every time. But for smaller home setups both options are probably fine anyhow.
I use tiddlywiki for my single-user wiki. The setup is dead simple, one html file on your computer you open directly. There is also a nodejs server implementation, which I use.