FWIW, I've been on Catalina for a couple of months now, which means no uBlock, and the web has been pretty usable. Safari alone seems to be doing a pretty good job with isolating the worst ads.
That being said, this post reminded me to install a replacement, so I just installed Adguard. We'll see how it goes.
I installed Adguard myself after reading this post — it appears as though they've split the functionality into many extensions, and only a few require full-page access. I'm trying it without those "advanced" extensions enabled and it seems to be doing just fine.
No because Safari is my “web browser”. It’s the one I use for HN/Reddit etc. Anything I’d consider “private” like email or banking or even GitHub is done with FireFox or Chrome.
Also I didn’t see anything flagrantly bad at first glance.
Edit: Looking closer you may be referring to the old extension and not the new “content blocker” version, which is sandboxed by Safari and didn’t need to ask for any permissions.
That being said, this post reminded me to install a replacement, so I just installed Adguard. We'll see how it goes.