It's definitely less ergonomic but I successfully trained my extremely non-technical wife to use a VNC client on her phone to control the media center PC so she can watch streaming/youtube with an adblocking browser.
If you go to the trouble of setting up a media server and Kodi/Plex on the TV, and install a barebones launcher that avoids all the ads on the official launcher, the remote still works well. I don't know whether to blame Sony or Google but every system update brought bigger and bigger ads to the point that I took an afternoon off to sideload an extremely plain ad-free launcher.
