As a diehard Firefox user, it has never been competitive with safari when it comes to performance. JavaScriptCore and WebKit are kind of ridiculously fast. If only they were put in a browser that was at all usable.
So I am torn between the two.
I ended up migrating to Better as it uses Apple's API for this(I think it's a list of things to block), is OSS, and Apple seemed to be helping them with a change of ownership publicly and that lended some trust.
uBlock (without Origin in the name) is property of the same owners as AdBlock Plus, and both extensions whitelist ads under their owners' "Acceptable Ads" program, with many of the advertisers paying for that special access.
Here's a link to a tweet showing Safari with 400 tabs on a M1 MacBook Air… the performance is incredible.
Turns out Chrome choked and became unresponsive when trying to do the same thing: https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1328790134548905985?s=20
RE: extensions, I run Adguard for Safari and that’s pretty much it; it’s free and it catches most ads. Safari also has built in tracker blocking now, which is nice to have but more or less ignorable.
The nice thing about having Safari be your main browser is that you can reserve Chrome for development, and having a vanilla Chrome browser where content scripts don’t haphazardly log things to the console or block requests is really nice.
Many authors have used Apple's utility to convert their extensions for use in Safari.
It's pretty straightforward; here's an example: https://ngyikp.com/safari-14-webextensions/
The author will likely need to make a few tweaks and changes; it shouldn't be that hard.