Future Chrome update just might kill ad-blocker extensions. In October 2017, Google laid out plans to make extensions safer to use, however, these changes will reflect APIs and these might prevent most content blockers from working.
Chrome extensions use a certain manifest version that determines what APIs they can and cannot use. The current manifest version is v2 and was introduced in 2012. Manifest v3 is currently under development, and will include several breaking changes to APIs, including one that affects content blockers. In a Chromium bug tracker, Raymond Hill, the developer behind uBlock Origin and uMatrix, explained that one of the changes in Manifest v3 would break complex content filtering.
To put in simple, one of the suggested changes in Manifest V3 will replace the webRequest API with a new declarativeNetRequest API, which has far more limitations. Though this change has obvious performance benefits such as Chrome no longer has to wait for extensions to allow/block every network request, it would break countless extensions that rely on heavily modifying network requests. Since Manifest V3 is still under development, there’s every bit of chance that Google might drop this specific API change.