This is the reason I've stopped surfing the web and stay on news aggregate sites. It's madness how many dependencies sites have.
Having Little Snitch on and not allowing general port 80/443 will make you perfectly aware.
Trying to keep the head space clean, and there is only so much time at my disposal with caring for a family.
So at the same time I got pissed about how much deps sites rely on, I discovered that there wasn't much to miss either. It's like dropping facebook, just a relief. To be fair I'm talking about news outlets mainly.
I was there when we had the BBS with dial-up modems. HTML was sweet, but it got quite boring when it faced reality. It's easy for people to share now, but just how easy can it be for people to care about what they share and how? (Like caring about how much tracking there is etc.)
My wife and I strongly disagree, she lives in the real world and actually like how well she can communicate and I'm just overwhelmed instead and care about the technicalities.
The jury's still out on the health effects of our digital culture. It's too strange and too young to really get clean long-term results on it. But I would be utterly floored if it was having no significant effect on our well-being and culture. There's probably some positive and some negative, but hey--cigarettes help aid digestion, after all.
I've written about it here before, but leaving the digital life completely for periods is easily the most healthiest things I've done.
TL;DR: Blocker extensions are easy but they can be compromised.
You could actually roll your own uBlock extension: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
then write a script that updates it in your browser. Is that safe enough? :)