Why does uBO need competition? It appears to me that it offers the best combination of features and performance out there.
Moreover, the choice to implement as a proxy has some serious drawbacks, features like uBO's cosmetic filters won't be practical to implement in a proxy.
If for whatever reason uBlock Origin went away tomorrow there would be a fork. uBlock Origin is the second (or third, I forget) fork of the original project.
The result is that now, all users of either of these extensions benefit from a better and faster product, thanks to emulation between competing projects. This would not necessarily happen in the absence of competition. In the end, users benefit.
(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the performance study)
[1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
Sure, no argument there. But the original comment said that in this case it is "much needed", suggesting something more specific than just "competition is generally good".
Lots of comments here are making non-specific arguments that "competition" leads directly to improvements in products/technology. It seems to me what is missing here is a concrete idea for making an ad-blocker work better, not an avenue for making a new/different approach available. (In particular, the goals of this project seem to be much more about working around upcoming Chrome extension changes rather than about improving the behavior in some way)
I don't think there is anything wrong with uBO, but its days in Chrome are numbered, which is why I ditched Chrome for Vivaldi.
Having said that, competition both puts some pressure to improve more, and also explores some alternative, possibly better, avenues. Historical example: Firefox was significantly better than IE 6 / 7 / 8, and yet ended up improving much more in the course of competing vis a vis Chrome.
All in all, a staunch-and-fair competitor is good to have.