There are actually quite a lot of smaller/niche players popping up too which cater for different company sizes, level of experience. For someone who just recently started in the PM space Productboard was quite hard to get my head around (although I do like their approach), and Aha is just a nightmare.
Some of the newcomers are shipit, roadmap, toggl track
I use Toggl Track for time blocking and tracking. But I don't give every hour a job. I just give jobs to the time I want or need to set aside, while the rest of just left for whatever.
I use Toggl Track and it has most of those features.
#2 is worded weird to me. You can't make any templates for tasks/activities/events in Toggl. Rather, you name any task/activity/event, and, as long as you keep the same task name, project, and tag, then it will accumulate time even across days and months.