His opinion is irrelevant. User experience is all that matters.
As a developer I've often built "inferior" versions of products for specific user groups. The product worked perfectly for those users, they saw no difference. Yet, when asked, I'd maintain that it's inferior because <technical reasons>. And you know what? We are both right.
The author of both extensions stated facts of user experience.[1] This included some users would not notice a difference.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
You are saying that the author's opinion doesn't matter your singular experience is the only reasonable benchmark which seems less defensible. For practical quality we should also consider future resistance against anti adblocking something that the author is able to do unlike a user who just notices it hasn't failed yet.
Consider manifest v3 has a fixed block list that can only be updated with the extension and only with permission of the browser.