Are there any usable solutions for end-users besides wholesale blocking of ad/analytics/tracker services? With all this, it seems pretty reasonable to assume all third-party elements on the web are hostile.
The trouble is that a lot of good and bad JS/CSS/content is gotten from third-party sites. Some websites are simply useless unless your browser loads third-party JS (e.g. Bootstrap). The ability to load third-party code/content is built into HTML and web developers naturally take advantage of that capability.
But yeah, there seems to be a lot of animosity towards the idea of blocking javascript here. Maybe because there is a lot of webdevelopers visiting this site, and they instinctively react when someone is trying to take their toys away.
For some time now, I've used ublock origin, which I find better overall than umatrix.
These sites are definitely making the problem much bigger, typically not even caring.
The developer a site actually gives instead of a user an access to the user's data to any other entity from which the developer "just references the scripts or fonts or whatever" to shorten his development time.
A huge problem. The article that we comment to shows very specific examples.
Privacy Badger assumes that third-party scripts used by more than one first party are potential trackers and blocks them by default, except common CDNs which just get cookies blocked. It's pretty usable: doesn't break nearly as much stuff as NoScript et al, and unlike an ad-blocker only blocks ads that track.