I wanted to like qutebrowser, also for the minimalist interface. But not supporting ublock is a showstopper for me. Is that still the case?

I don't think it supports ublock but it does have an integrated AdBlock now. It's based on the library Brave used and supported ABP style block lists.

It has an integrated ad blocker, which is good enough for me.

You have to run :adblock-update once to enable it.

There's also the nyxt browser which can be setup to vi or emacs bindings https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt

Just to share my own experience of trying to make this my daily web driver, both these solutions are using webkit, and webkit behaviour is not exactly perfect and can be a real pain to update. Same issue with Nyxt, which I very much wanted to use. In the end I went for Trydactyl which give the best of both world: a web browser that works, with a decent ecosystem for extensions (lack of ublock is very quickly felt, even if yes there are some alternatives but... not as good and simple) and a powerful interface that you can mod to your needs, vim or emacs shortcut can be used.

They do use Blink (Chromium) internally, but it's my understanding that it is just bundled inside. I've run qutebrowser both as compiled and from source and not had any issues updating.

Qutebrowser includes its own adblocker, which must be activated once after install and works well enough.

It also supports both userscripts and python scripting. Although that takes more fiddling, there's a pretty healthy support community for it.