I killed off ads in the News app by blocking doh.apple.com. I find it kind of funny that it looks up its DoH server IP using the existing DNS server and that simply returning NXDOMAIN cuts it off.
Not sure if they use it for much more than that though (doesn’t seem like it).
True, somewhat... but on the iPhone, many functions that seem like basic things are tied to Apple's services and cannot easily replaced by selfhosted services. This phone would not work properly anymore.
The phone looks at all of it's radio environment (cell and WiFi and whatnot) and from that it calculates it's location. GPS may help a little, too, but it's not important.
It needs Apple's own databases to do that: collections of all antennas in the world, and their known locations.
In that case, your phone needs to "see" at least 4 satellites at the same time (more is even better) to get the first GPS lock, and that's probably why you need to wait for so long.
It could help to walk to a spot with no buildings, trees etc.
Once there was an app called "GPS essentials" to help with that.
You can enforce an always-on VPN (for at least ipsec) via an MDM profile. This kind of features isn’t found in the casual user setup options, but there's plenty of knobs to tune in the enterprise profile configurator.
And yes, you can easily install that profile on your phone after.