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Certainly an option for me. But not a scalable solution for the large number of non-tech people with older devices.

Wasn’t there an old browser that would render the page on the server and just send down the result or something like that?

The old Opera for mobile did that. I think Chrome had something similar at one point.

Opera!

I’d love something like it for all my older devices where I can set it and forget it.

NextDNS is pretty good for this - just change the DNS in your network settings.

You'll also need to add bundles to block dns names ( free fyi)