Don't be afraid of the little reagent kits, they're easy to use and accurate and cheap! Think of them like little science kits. :)
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I have a similar one and I also did not find it to be useful.
This week I received a few capacitive soil sensors. I plan to hook up this and other sensors to a few ESP32s with WiFi and see if I can make a simple site with temperature and soil humidity charts for some of my plants.
For pH I just use pH strips for doing simple routine checks. For soil I'll add some soil to reverse-osmosis water, wait for the soil to settle at the bottom, and then stick the paper in. Not perfect but I just want to check that it doesn't jump too far either way.
I did this for awhile and it would work for a few weeks to a few months then the PCB substrate eventually corroded from to the soil. Putting nail polish all over the sensor helped for awhile but then it just didn't work.
The comments here gave me a lot of ideas: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/17/soil-moisture-sensors-how-do-they-work/
Yep, same. Mine corroded after a few months. Haven’t tried the epoxy idea from the comments but it sounds promising…