I hope you are right about this moving forward. My experience so far has been the same as yours (re: the arms race, uBlock working well). My understanding is Google is being super aggressive about this and they are not dumb, they know about uBlock, Pi Hole, and other ad blockers that people use. They want to make it impossible to use them by basically profiling your browser and its extensions. However, that could just kick off a variation on the arms race. A lot of things about their attitude makes me angry, but they are just ignoring the fact that advertisements are a vector for malware and don’t really care if they help spread malware as long as they are getting that sweet revenue.

Dumb question, will it be possible to create a browser that will trick the shitty new web into thinking you’re using an approved non-ad-blocking-browser while you still block the malware/ads?