You could use Blocky for this. It can do both, apply some block lists and use DoT/DoH resolvers.

Can you explain how to make it work for this use case?

There is no need to pay for an external service for this and I don’t think Mullvad would work for this use case.

I’ve never experienced any breakage.

Do you have uBO annoyances lists enabled? Because I never get any.

I went to cnn to try and didn’t have any. I couldn’t find the exact article in your screen but I tried a few without any popup.

Did you enable uBO annoyances lists?

What’s an ad-blocker popup? uBlock Origin never show me a popup.

No one is saying Chrome is the ethical choice, why are you reducing this to a 2 options choice?

All of them except uBlock Origin are in Arkenfox “Do not bother” extension list: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother