I was beginning to wonder if I can disable globally by default and have no popups, just manually enable it for a specific site if I want it badly enough (I don't think I ever will anyway).

Of course then they'll start showing weird UI pop ups to enable stuff, but if websites ever do that I will close them as I do with sites that tell me to disable adblock, the last few times I ever got malware on my system was due to ads, I am NEVER turning off adblock. This was many years ago, now I only download FLOSS just to keep it that way.