Occasionally even that hasn't saved me, but I suppose it's pretty close to the optimal UI. Maybe it just needs to partition the history entries by domain to defeat the sites that spam the hell out of your history.

This is the same in Brave (and I'd assume Chrome as well). You can also just right click on the back button.

I think you're talking about a different problem. Here I'm not talking about tracking, just websites that hijack the back button.

Yeah it can be annoying depending on if the glass is half full or half empty YMMV. Myself I know such sites won't waste my bandwidth loading a script that won't really run if it doesn't get what it wants, I won't sit there for twenty or thirty seconds while some background thing pretends to do something, they (the site) won't get to scape the IP, not any stats that I was interested in whatever it was, nor get to reach for the cookie jar ... they don't win. There's usually more agreeable sites but not always. Despite that, it really puts a smile on my face.