Nope. My personal preference is uMatrix, but that's an implementation detail. I rarely see an ad, and I didn't see any on this page. Also, I have more or less tuned out Facebook and similar sleaze, and I try to maintain some vigilance concerning anything which begins to unduly attract my attention.

And then I have to wonder: Am I living in a cleanroom? Am I letting my defenses rot? Am I setting myself up for a fall if some day I end up face to face with all the unfiltered gunk out there, presented in some new, insidious manner that I believe myself far too sophisticated to succumb to? Have I - or we - perhaps already succumbed, but do not know it?

Didn't the author of uMatrix stop using it himself in favor of uBlock origin?

No idea. It's certainly still being maintained. Gives you loads of very finegrained control. Not quite clear to me why it's so overshadowed by the good but far less capable uBlock.

I'm pretty sure you let your defenses against invasive advertising rot if you live in your adblocker bubble. You know, pathogens and immune systems and such...

I've done the same thing, but I wonder how much I am really protecting myself. I need to whitelist sites that I use to get them to work (HN, for example), but that doesn't stop HN from attacking me.

I suppose it raises the bar, but how soon until I whitelist a site that attacks me?

You don't need to whitelist HN. It works fine without it. It just involves reloads. Also, it really helps to only ever temporarily whitelist so exposure is minimized and you learn what you can get by with.

You'll never have perfect security, but whitelisting JS does raise your defense a lot : mainly because you'll be able to block most attacks from third parties/ads

That's why javascript blocker is just one layer of a multilayer defense.

It would be an excellent outcome of Meltdown/Spectre if we could just get rid of JavaScript and other attempts at throwing arbitrary crap code at you (such as WASM unblockable ads, bc miners, and what not) and work towards the original goal of the Web as federated (or even better p2p) hyperlinked documents once again.

Seriously. My kingdom for 10pt verdana and a few hours clicking through a web ring.