A situation we can all imagine ourselves in: You need to check the google analytics for your website/company site. You can't because it's blocked at Host level.
What solution would there be for this use case?
Aside Google sponsored links and the odd ad sponsored link on pseudo-news sites not working (due to them being tracking URLs), I can't see it ever gets in my way.
However to answer your question, these days I run dnsmasq on my home server and have my DHCP server assign that as my primary DNS. So every device (phone, laptop, smart TV, etc) gets their ads blocked as well - which is particularly good for my TV as it's bad enough having regular adverts on TV without LG pushing out sponsored content as well. So if there was a rare occasion that I needed to turn off my ad blocking, I'd just change the DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) then switch back to my dnsmasq server once i was done (the only complication being that I sometimes need to close and reopen the browser due to that particular application caching the DNS lookup)
The nice thing about using dnsmasq is that you can import those hosts files verbatim. Which means your update script can be simple.
I did intend to reinvestigate the issue; throw wireshark on a promiscuous NIC and look for what domain Sky was trying to connect to and what data it was sending. I was thinking it might make an interesting article - depending on what I find. But in all honesty I had then forgotten about it until now.
[1] strips domains to the top level that the public can register using https://publicsuffix.org/
It also can quickly "dnsgate disable/enable". (dnsmasq only, quick enable/disable for /etc/hosts is not supported yet, patches appreciated)
I've been using this simple script on OS X for quite some time now. It works like a charm and is using git for that exact reason, to be able to quickly disable/enable and also keep track of exceptions, changes, etc.
Generally your browser will pick it up quickly as well. It doesn't cache host file entries in the same way as dns lookups so the effect of adding or removing is pretty much instant. I use Chrome mostly, so I am not as sure about other browsers.
also
$man nscd