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I disabled third party cookies in Chrome. Doesn't this basically do the same?

Nope. That's a good first step but here are many ways to track you outside of 3rd party cookies. Google Analytics, for example, uses 1st party cookies.

and that's why I have the following in my hosts file, together with thousands more.

127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com www.google-analytics.com

I find it doesn't slow down browsers as much as adblock and similar extensions.

The host based approach won't block as well as Adblock (Edge/Plus) however as those plugins can block ads at the DOM element level.

There are many sites that host/proxy their ads on their own domain name but AB can block the <divs> and such by name or by other properties like size.

They can still collect data from you, just not persist anything through cookies.

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