Giving it up for work is not possible. But for entertainment it's different the gp not only mentions Reddit, but other news sites and specifically the ones linked from HN. It's a general trend that almost everybody does, probably because "everybody is doing it".
There are good alternatives like reading books, watching movies or going out. Web sites are shooting themselves in their feet. Blockers end up being too much work with this arms race. They think they're "winning" when they're actually just selecting the people that can't choose.
I regularly browse HN and click through to articles. I run firefox / noscript on both mobile and desktop. I occasionally have to enable or temp-enable some stuff in noscript to be able to read articles, but it's a small minority of cases, and probably smaller if I wasn't so prone to temp-enabling rather than enabling.
For sessions where I know I want js to "just work", like online shopping from a set of presumed-trustworthy sites, I use a different browser profile without privacy extensions, but I use it just for those purposes and avoid general browsing with it.
To make multi-profile browsing simple, I theme the profiles differently, so it's obvious which one I'm in. On desktop, my launcher for firefox does --ProfileManager --new-instance and on mobile I just use different firefoxes - ff-beta and ff itself.
Is this "too much work?" - I can see how it might look like that, but I've been using this system for a few years, and though it takes a few minutes to set up on a new system or device the maintenance overhead is low, so I'd say it's not "too much." Also, the time gained not waiting for js-encrusted sites to load probably outweighs the setup/maintenance by a considerable factor.
There are good alternatives like reading books, watching movies or going out. Web sites are shooting themselves in their feet. Blockers end up being too much work with this arms race. They think they're "winning" when they're actually just selecting the people that can't choose.