An no, there isn't "tons of alternatives". In theory there is. But in practice, they can really make your life harder. Some may say that Signal is an alternative for WhatsApp, but if people you communicate with don't want to use anything but WhatsApp, then Signal is useless. I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event, I found nothing better, simply because that's the platform that reaches the most people. Network effects... But also, your favorite show may not be on "alternative" streaming platforms, sometimes your job, or worse, the government may require a specific website.
There are extremists who are ready to find alternative friends, shows or jobs just to avoid using some website. It is a good thing these people exist, that's how progress is made. But for most people you have to make compromises.
Why would a site that hopes you'll send them money in exchange for product, refuse your traffic if you have an ad blocker enabled? That just costs them money. Same for government forms, why would they refuse your traffic if you're blocking ads?
It might not be intentional to break the site experience for adblock users - but there is a number of sites that has implemented link tracking in a way that overrides the normal click (though sometimes not keypress) events, to let the tracking code do its thing. If the tracking code is blocked or fails to load, that means a lot of actions break.
Best part? Trying to convince the operators of such sites that users they cannot see in their "analytics solution" are worth fixing their site for is not exactly a straightfoward job - from their narrow view, these users simply do not exist, because the tracking does not show them!
I don't. I mean, if it's a news site just search for the title in a search engine and you'll find other articles. If it's a web application I search for an alternative and bookmark that. If you really want to avoid even loading it, you can just block the whole site with your adblocker but I don't go that far.
That is what I currently do. It turns casual browsing into a frustrating scavenger hunt. The whole point of the web was to make links effortless so you could browse sites. This breaks that whole model.
