Putting hosts (and domains) under control of /etc/hosts and dnsmasq means that there's little likelihood of traffic reaching them from your browser (though Web hosts could provide back-end data transfers).

It's also possible to directly address hosts by IP, though unlikely (Web protocols such as virtualhosts would fail).

I'm strongly favouring uMatrix for now. It takes some tuning, but you have fine-grained control over CSS, images, scripts, XHR, frames, and other bits, by domain or host.

Aggregators and CDNs confound things a bit (Akamai, Amazon's cloudy thing.)

For Firefox, the real comparisons are Request Policy and ublock (origin) in advanced mode (for chrome, umatrix). These do full third-party host whitelisting per domain. So every time you visit a website on a new domain, by default all requests to third parties are blocked. Then you spend a few minutes working out which ones are required.

By comparison, noscript simply blocks javascript from third parties. It does include a number of anti-xss heuristics though.

I can't say whether it's better or worse. It's different. With NoScript you still hit "remote" servers when it comes to other resources, like images.

I think it could make pages load marginally faster, because NoScript only stops scripts from executing, where a hosts blocklist would stop the scripts from ever being downloaded.

I think, not totally sure how NoScript works.