Try Firefox mobile with ublock origin. I wish more Android users knew about this.

Sidenote: ads on sites degrade the experience so badly, whenever I browse without adblock I am honestly shocked at how bad it is, and I am amazed others don't seem to care.

I'm confused, on my stock Android phone, I use Firefox with ublock origin. So the Play Store blocking ad blockers cannot be that effective?

Root users like myself use tools like AdAway to managing hosts blocking. This will help cover a lot of ads in apps as well. You also have alternative WebView implementations like Bromite (although I wish it were easier to install and worked on Android 10) that can give you ad blocking in apps using web views too.

This is also missing the part where you can run Android without the Play Store using microG and F-Droid + Aurora. It's not a huge number, but there are still a lot of people blocking ads in one form or another--even if it's as simple as using Firefox or Brave for basic browsing.

On the Samsung Galaxy you just install Samsung Internet and from within it you can add AdBlock Plus (and most of the other adblockers). They are delivered through Samsung's apk store.

It saved the mobile surfing experience for me (was using chrome on the mobile before)..

I am certain many jailbroken androids are out there using adblockers. Firefox also has plugins internally blocking ads.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/adblock-plus/

DNS66 from F-Droid works well. It routes all web traffic through a tunnel applying hosts file(s) to block domains associated with ads and other dodgy cruft.