uBO Lite exists and I can't see any visible difference in how well it works. So, it's not a price you need to pay at all.

In my testing, UBO Lite is not working as well on YouTube. It blocks the ad, but you still have to skip it. Original UBO didn't require this.

Yea but, I think its a bit misplaced to be angry at Google for this. Surely its the content creators that place the ads in their content to blame for this.

I don't understand why they ads are not spliced into the stream. It would be undetectable by extensions at all.

Because ads are auctioned in nanoseconds. This isn't the newspaper were everyone saw the same as which was vetted by the editors. You are seeing different ads than your neighbour. Everything is automated to cost as little money as possible.

Anyone with a mildly popular extension that has read/write * would be offered lots of money to sell it to, usually, scammers or hackers.

Maybe you're willing to pay the price, but that doesn't mean it was what's best for the ecosystem.

At the platform level, you have to have a security model, and sometimes it will conflict with functionality. I’m sure there’s a lot of potentially interesting browser extensions you could build with the ability to read and write arbitrary files, but Chrome has decided (much less controversially) that the sandbox is key to their security model and extensions can’t ask to escape it.

If manifest V3 ad blockers were nonfunctional to the point of being broken, I’d be more concerned, but in my experience they’re perfectly OK.

My content blocker on Safari blocks all the same ads as ublock origin in Chrome, with no supposedly no risk of outbound data.