uBlock Origin is no longer available in the Chrome store

Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.

Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.

uBO is not just an ad blocker, its almost a firewall against malware and a tracking filter

I was about to comment something similar but you said it before I did. Sometimes I'll mistakenly open YouTube with Chrome and then I realize I messed up because I have to sit through three, sometimes one-minute long ads just to watch a twenty second video. I'll typically just nope out and switch to Firefox. The worst thing is they're unskippable and I swear for some of them the ad actually pauses if you switch to another tab or browser. I'm getting ads even on super old videos so I'm pretty sure it isn't all to do with the channels themselves monetizing their videos.

Im old enough to remember the internet before ads, and with ads became a thing and you had to make sure to keep your speakers low/off all the time less some screaming loud ad popped up somewhere to burst your eardrums at 2am.

There were so many obnoxious, visual cancer ads.

Then they became actual digital cancer by being injection points for viruses and malware, and thus adblockers became a necessity.

And they remain a necessity to this day, for the same reason as they were 20+ years ago.

and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking.

not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.

I went to help out a friend, a few years ago, he runs vanilla Edge, I can't believe anyone actually uses the internet like that.

I'd be okay with sites showing me unintrusive non targeted ads, but since it's all or nothing I choose nothing.