Yes the amount of effort to manually whitelist everything needed to make pages work but still not show ads/trackers is too much.
I use uBlock with stock default settings. I also have set my browser to purge cookies, local storage, and history every time I close the browser. That's low effort and cuts the annoying crap from websites by a large amount.
If you're using Firefox, check out the containers extension as well. You can isolate sessions or specific websites without worrying about clearing cookies and history. It's not perfect in terms of usability but is a great advancement for plugging privacy leaks
I use uBlock with stock default settings. I also have set my browser to purge cookies, local storage, and history every time I close the browser. That's low effort and cuts the annoying crap from websites by a large amount.