If you want good support and free whois privacy porkbun.com is the best I've used. Another option ive used is namecheap they've gotten big enough their quality has dropped imo.
I didn't even think of that! I have a few domains on namecheap and you have to remove whois protection before you move them to another register the moment you do all info gets scrapped and sold for marketing. Last time that happened i got 100s of spam calls, junk mail to my physical address, and an absurd amount of email spam. It was a nightmare.
I've found Cloudflare is cheaper than Google Domains, and allows for more flexibility of setups. A $12 domain on google can be $9 or less on Cloudflare. (this is a per-year price. So the cheaper you get the domain, will exponentially be cheaper over 10+ years)
Cloudflare is also a layer of protection to your pihole. You shouldn't run in to that many issues by buying a domain but I'm not sure what you're trying to do. Just buying a domain is like buying a username, it doesn't do much until you point it somewhere. So if you're pointing it to your pi-hole to host something then I'd look in to hosting services to save yourself a bit of a security issue.
Ah okay, then yeah for sure I'd say there is really no difference between them besides price and convenience of redirecting your DNS. You can always transfer where it's registered later as well depending on if they charge fees or not.
I've been using Namecheap for personal domains for around 10 years now. Since a few years back, privacy guard is included in the domain price (at least for .com domains) so your name, address, ... won't appear directly on whois queries.
As it's just one domain, (longterm) pricewise I don't think there'll be a big difference with any of them. 1 or 2 € per year, maybe. It'll be more important to check longterm price of the domain (.com / .io / ...), as you'll probably find some offer for the first year.
FWIW, namecheap publishes a recurrent offer around 10th October (apart from some random offers every once in a while) If you go with them, you can register for one year and renew the domain for a longer period when you find an offer.
I've been using namecheap for more than ten years now, and I have no complaints. Everything just works, at least as far as my usage goes, and the pricing feels very reasonable.
I've been using gandi.net since forever, it's alright. The main selling point these days is the availability of pretty much all TLDs I guess. They have a strong privacy and consumer rights legacy, but that's been kind of fading as they've grown over the years.
I don't think one is necessarily better than another, though there are some sketchy actors out there with some real shady business practises.
If you go with any of the ones you mention in your OP you'll be fine though.
It's important to remember with a lot of places like that you don't own the domain. Ive heard stories where valuable domains are taken over by the owners as well.
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