I'm not an apple user, so sorry if this is way off but...

... isn't the direction Google's taking here the same as what Apple already did with Safari? Is Safari actually any better in this particular regard?

I seem to recall that the Safari content blocking API is like the proposed Chromium API, but that doesn't alarm people because a) Apple is less of an ad company than Google, so less of a perceived conflict of interest b) Google is perceived to break stuff that is already working c) Safari/Webkit aren't dominant outside of iOS where they're mandatory