This is a great response and I’m glad to have read it. However I think you miss one important disadvantage of your approach: These alternatives are mostly blacklists, and so they become less useful as you get further into the less-trafficked corners of the web, which is also where you’re most likely to hit, e.g., invisible compromised resources.
I’ve also been surprised at how little “whitelist fatigue” I’ve gotten. I would have naively expected to get tired of whitelisting domains, but in practice it’s continued to feel freeing rather than obnoxiously attention consuming, and site functionality is almost always easy / obvious to enable properly. It’s possible that sometimes I miss intended functionality, but I doubt that this comes close to outweighing the benefits.
Edit: the following paragraph misunderstands Said’s comment and doesn’t address the point that it was meant to; apologies.
Finally, I don’t buy the argument about incentivizing web authors. If trackers work less well, there is obviously less incentive to use them. If the only thing holding back authors from adding trackers willy-nilly is user annoyance at page bloat, then it’s clearly not enough, and so telling people to just go on shouldering that annoyance to ensure that the annoyance is minimized seems like privileging second-order effects that I would expect to be small.
You’re right; I’m sorry that I didn’t read your comment sufficiently carefully.
The reasoning there is purely my expectation and isn’t based on data or particular experience.