Not really, no. The lists themselves are ultimately less interesting than the technology used to run them; there are other lists, and if easylist soured, a community-sourced alternative could be made relatively easily.
I actually doubt that. Finding the right rules is quite a bit of work and hobbyists will only look for such stuff for so long until they get bored. Programming can be fun but adding the nearly but not exactly the same rule to a filter list for the 2,000th time will eventually get tedious. Especially if you are playing a cat and mouse game and you are the (unpaid) cat and the mouse has quite strong incentives to get paid.
Doesn't that argument work for the plugin too. I mean most people using uBlock Origin probably started with Adblock (and maybe moved to ABP), or uBlock.
You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.
Back in the day I used a local proxy tool, Proximator or something.
AFAIK uBo isn't doing anything particular unique technologically (which doesn't mean I'm not grateful, nor that anyone could make it).
> You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.
You can't. uBO has contextual information for each network request, something not available to external content blocking solutions.
For example, many filters are meant to apply only on specific domains or whether they are 1st- or 3rd-party, and for this to work you need to know from which origin a network request is fired.
Also, uBO has an advanced-user mode that let you create rules to override filters in static filter lists; allows to work in default-deny mode; or even allows to work with no static filter lists at all. Contextual information is key to advanced-user mode features.
I use element filtering to strip Google News links off of the search page on the offhand chance I can't find something on DuckDuckGo and have to go back to it.
