For as far as I know, Chrome on Android has no support for plugins at all, whereas Safari on iOS does support plugins, including adblockers. I don’t see why Chromium would support plugins on iOS, since they obviously benefit from the fact that you can’t block ads.

You should try kiwi

I'm mostly a Firefox on Android user, does Chrome on Android have plugins now? I know it didn't for a while.

I assume you mean extensions, not plugins. No, Chrome doesn't support extensions on android, but some Chromium reskins do.

That said, the most important extension usecase is adblocking, and with Manifest v4 and FLoC/Topics and SafetyNet/remote attestation, well...

Chrome's adblocking capabilities, introduced in Manifest v3, are (1) inspired by Safari and (2) more capable than what Safari provides.

You can track this uBlock Origin Lite issue: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/52

The typical browser user doesn't even know what plugins/extensions are, much less use any.

Not quite true, around 800 million people use adblockers[0].

[0] https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/

That is a minority of browser users.

30% of adblock user penetration in the US is not that neglectable.

That is a different claim. And many of them used DNS ad blocks probably. Or were happy with Safari extensions.

And growing. People are waking up. I've been a Pi-hole user for 7 years now. I will never not use something like it. Works on phones, laptops, TVs, everything. Since Pi-hole won't block ads on YouTube, I use uBlock Origin for this on my laptop, PopTube on phone, and for my TV, disabled the NIC, put my Firestick in developer mode, downloaded SmartTubeNext and have not seen an ad on any platform I control in years. I cannot fathom how people deal with ads. SmartTubeNext also blocks sponsors, which are just as bad. The second some YTer starts to shill, that's the second I bail from their channel. Finding indy channels that just provide info is increasingly difficult.