Ah, I figured out what was going on when collecting logs again. Previously i was grep-ing for blocked and black listed requests. Was just doinga tail this time and reading. Noticed a bunch of url's were being resolved by my /etc/hosts file. I guess some script added add those in and I never noticed. Removed those and things are working as expected.
edit: realized the hosts file entry's seem to be left over from an older version of pi hole since most things were migrated to the block list properly.
I guess feature request is to log host file resolutions in a diff color too to make debugging a bit easier
thanks for all the help guys
tldr; checks hosts file in addition to gravity/blocklist configurations