I’ll gladly install 10-20 extensions if I have to, along with a master extension that handles cosmetic filtering.

The list could easily be shrunken by combining some of those rules into regex based rules. Indeed, enormous regex based rules used to be common in the early days, but seem to have fallen out of favor. I'm guessing that it turns out that they were slower, or one of the major extensions did not support them or something.

There is some form of complexity limit for regex based entries, and only 1000 of them are allowed per extension's static list (an additional 1000 are allowed for the dynamic blocklists). But I'd be pretty surprised if they were so limited they could not bring EasyList back within the 30k limit.

So basically, if there is no global limit being applied, one would probably need about one extension per major blocklist, with smaller blocklists potentially being able to be combined into shared extensions.