1Blocker is a rip off. Wipr doesn't work properly. ABP lets a lot of ads through. There is nothing that approaches uBlock at all.
as a windows user i was puzzled by this when installing adguard
My guess is that it's engineered like this to simplify their code base(s) between their various free plugins and their paid "Adguard for Mac" and "Adguard for Windows" apps.
The Electron app needs to run to set options or to force filters update, not the rest of the time. It's still an annoyance but it's better than nothing.
How does it not work properly? Been using it and am pretty satisfied so far.