That's amazing. I just assumed the ad lists were volunteer maintained like a wiki. I'll be sure to use Easylist now that I know they're also advocating for users while punishing bad advertisers.
I'm still not entirely sure it's for the best or not.
On one hand, it is a concentration of power into hands a few people.
On the other, it is for a good cause, to maintain a list of ad network and site banners that drain resources, cause privacy issues, etc.
The Easylist people aren't saints. They get paid off by Google to allow "Acceptable Ads". So you just show a different campaigns if your user is running adblocker nowadays.
That's a lot of work to bypass the blocks on a browser that's far from the market leader. Now, even if the browser does become popular enough in the future to be targeted, the developers would probably gain enough resources and support to replace one of the engines with the other.
Easylist will contact you, strongarm you into disabling your countermeasures and threaten to block all JS on your page if you don't comply.
So no ad servers can load, no prebid, nothing will function/load if the user has an adblocker that uses easylist (all of them) installed.