>Instead Google wants developers to use the declarativeNetRequest API, which has the browser, not the extension, strip content or resources from a visited web sites. This API, though, has a limit of 30,000 rules that can be created.
>Unfortunately, this change will break popular ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, which rely on the original functionality of the webRequest API and need more rules than are available in the declarativeNetRequest API.
Looking at an old picture of ublock origin block lists: https://www.bleepstatic.com/images/news/u/1100723/uBlockOrig... we can see 150,000 rules. The whole point of a rules list (easylist/easyprivacy) is that they're easy to maintain, since it should be a surprise to no one that adding new ad domains is trivially trivial. EasyList alone is 30,000 rules and it alone is woefully insufficient for a modern-day browser. The declarativeNetRequest only allows for ONE type of filter to work. The static kind, i.e. the old, deprecated, bad, insufficient kind.
Recommended reading: uBlock Origin developer's comments on this change (unanswered by google ofc) https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...