> Google ... had to ... destroy the APIs so that they're useless.

I see this repeated over and over and yet uBlock Origin Lite still seems to block almost all ads. I'm not saying I wouldn't prefer the non-lite version. But, given I basically still don't see ads it's kind of hard to argue Google destroyed the APIs so that they're useless

There’s also ad blockers for iOS safari, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t support ublock. There’s nothing in manifest v2 that’s required for ad blocking.