I use uBlock Origin, Ghostery and Disconnect, and Flash Control. peppercarrot.com is all zeroes for all three blockers, meaning nothing is blocked because there's nothing noticed that needs to be blocked. There are no Flash Control icons, meaning no video or audio noticed and blocked. Thanks for caring. :)
On the front page of theguardian.com, logged in as me, there's a V icon at the top, meaning that Flash Control has blocked video, probably for some gratuitous menu feature. I have zero trouble using and reading the site.
When I first opened theguardian a few minutes ago, uBlock was blocking 13 requests. It's steadily climbed in those minutes to 32 blocked requests. Ghostery is noticing/blocking 0 trackers. Disconnect is blocking two: nielsen and comscore. Disconnect is also blocking 1 from Facebook and 3 from Google. All three tools may be seeing and blocking some of the same things.
Without these four tools, except for low/no-commercial technical sites and public service sites like wikipedia my web is all but unusable. With them my web is fine.
I very rarely have any problems using any site. I had to enable my bank in uBlock to use their popup bill pay feature. I think I had trouble viewing a cartoon at The New Yorker; I forget what I did to view it. Youtube and Flash Control seem to be in a perpetual arms race, as was the case with Flashblock. Youtube is my main motivation for using Flash Control, to prevent automatic video playing.
And yep, I get that sites pay the bills with ads. I $ubscribe to three news sites, and I also get that that doesn't pay the whole bill. The web is either going to have to block me for using a blocker (I've been seeing that very rarely recently, or at least "Unblock us please") or figure out a less dangerous, intrusive and loadsome way to serve ads. (And yep, I just made up the word "loadsome." I can do anything!)
EDIT: I whitelist duckduckgo.com in uBlock.