Solution: use a browser that respect client-side overrides. You should be doing this anyways, if you want a usable adblock browsing experience. People that use Safari or flip-phone browsers don't reserve the right to complain about the web being unusable.
To quote Thom Yorke, "You do it to yourself, you do; and that's why it really hurts"
In many cases, you can probably get by with your browser's default Reader Mode.
I'll use uBlock Origin's element zapper on a whole heck of a lot of sites, and you can write default rules for common annoyances as well.
If you get fancy, you can write generalised styles which address specific annoyances, and toggle those on or off on specific websites.
Otherwise, I'd found I'd written a thousand or so custom styles over a couple of years at one point. Most were quite elementary (usually font tweaks or removing headers / social link-litter). A few ... somewhat less elementary. Taught myself a lot about CSS in the process.
I don't think they meant that it would be needed to make new overrides for every site typically. Dark Reader extension works fine with 99% of sites out of the box and is free.
You seem to be referring to the ios/mac app store thing specifically, which is NOT what 99% of people use. That is a separate whole browser with the extension pre-installed and completely unnecessary.
Just use the links in the middle of the page and it will install it for free like every other normal browser extension people use all the time.
The firefox extension alone has 1 million installs just from this page, we all installed it for free and have been using it for years. I think asserting that there are only paid options is disingenuous to say the least.