(x-posted comment) There’s a MV3 alternate (same dev!) “uBlock Origin Lite” which this article completely misses out on mentioning: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh
There are certain websites and tools which need chrome/chromium making it a necessary evil; for example there’s a new trend in firmware flashing of devices like ESP32 boards and HAM/GMRS radios which are web based and use Chrome tech. This new MV3 fork isn’t as good as the original but it’s better than nothing and does stop some ad trash.
To try and bake down the complex answers, if you are basically familiar with PGP or SSH keys the concept of a Passkey is sort of in the same ballpark. But instead of using the same SSH keypair more than once, Passkeys create a new keypair for every use (website) and possibly every device (e.g. 2 phones using 1 website may create 2 sets of keypars, one on each device) - and additionally embeds the username (making it "one-click login"):
ssh-keygen ...
)The client private key is stored hopefully in a secure part of the phone/laptop ("enclave" or TPM hardware module) which locks it to that device; using a portable password manager instead such as Bitwarden is attractive since the private keys are stored in BW's data (so can be synced across devices, backed up, etc.)
They use the phrase "replay" a lot to mean that sending the same password to a website is vulnerable to it being intercepted and used n+1 times (hacker); in the keypair model this doesn't happen because each "challenge" is a unique crypto math puzzle generated dynamically every use, like TOTP/2FA but "better" because there's no simple hash seed (TOTP/2FA use a constant seed saved by the client but it's not as robust crypto).