Same here - I used qutebrowser exclusively for a couple months, but in the end I couldn't handle all the annoying popups and autoplaying videos in modern websites - all things that you can block with a single plugin in Firefox, together with ads. Too bad, because Vim plugins never allow full UI control in Firefox(e.g. closing an empty "new tab" is impossible with Vim plugins).
Recently I switched from Vimium to Surfingkeys, which is comparable but also offers an actual Vim emulator for text field input. Can definitely recommend it.
Note that while I currently use Firefox, I haven’t yet added instructions on how to install my config there, which is different to Chrome due to lack of file system access permissions. Long story short, use the `gulp serve` task to start a server on `localhost:9919`, then point the SurfingKeys configurator there.
Try Vivaldi (chromium based browser with a LOT of settings). I had the same problem until I downloaded it, you can natively bind a key to close current tab, it will work on new tabs (and files)
I suppose looking at javascript sources and whitelisting by domain isn't impossible with the UI tools available in Qute but I don't think anything like that currently exists (I've looked around a little).
Still a real ad-blocker would be great, youtube is barely usable these days with three layers of unskippable ads on each video. (although you can work around that /specific/ problem with umpv and a hotkey to launch it: section10 https://qutebrowser.org/FAQ.html )
Recently I switched from Vimium to Surfingkeys, which is comparable but also offers an actual Vim emulator for text field input. Can definitely recommend it.