This is bad news, and I think it's quite short-sighted to assume that this will only affect Facebook.

just block all of Facebook itself... don't target the ads, Facebook is the ad.

why do people INSIST on playing inside the dragons den? seal the fuckers up and block them entirely.

There are things for which Facebook is currently irreplaceable if a certain group decided to use it. Local hobbyists, support groups etc. Facebook became indexable to search engines recently and it became apparent that it might be a decent alternative to Reddit for niche stuff (quality-wise). The vibe in those groups is much better because you’re not anonymous which leads to less jerks too.

Facebook is particularly skilled in preventing scraping and ad-blocking among all of big tech platforms. Reddit and Twitter still can’t manage to block third party clients/viewers for example. Facebook experience with those was always awful.

Facebook and Instagram are the worst offenders in my experience too, but is there really anything that would prevent them from repackaging and selling their solutions to other companies? Or a competitor attempting to make a copy of it?

If I've learned anything from looking at competing products over the years, it's that every company will attempt to lower itself to the bar of the worst but successful company. And if uBO developers give up, that's blood in the water all these sharks can smell.

For Instagram there’s Imginn and you can set automatic redirect with an extension. Instagram is a much less complex as a website though.

Facebook is a behemoth of various functionality they accumulated over the years. This complexity is probably what allows them to obfuscate so much of it. Reddit is kind of screwed as long as old.reddit.com exists. If I had to guess Meta treats it as a competitive advantage or „a moat”.

Facebook is currently irreplaceable

false. no website is irreplaceable.

Bro, what strawman are you debating? Literally if the Local group you’re interested in is hosted on Facebook, and there’s no replacement available, Then, at least in the short term, it is, by definition, irreplaceable.

Example: There’s a local mountain biking group. They exclusively interact and coordinate through a Facebook page. If I want to interact and ride with them, I have to go to Facebook.

Plenty of groups set up all their stuff on Facebook, and it’s not really possible to get them all to move platforms as much as we would want them to.

Bro, what strawman are you debating? Literally if the Local group you’re interested in is hosted on Facebook, and there’s no replacement available, then, at least in the short term, it is, by definition, irreplaceable.

Example: There’s a local mountain biking group. They exclusively interact and coordinate through a Facebook page. If I want to interact and ride with them, I have to go to Facebook. Plenty of groups set up all their stuff on Facebook, and it’s not really possible to get them all to move platforms as much as we would want them to.

That’s the spirit of what OP is saying. If the thing is on Facebook, and you want to do the thing, you have to go to Facebook.