Uhm, what??

uMatrix is an essential part of my everyday life.

Will it still work? If not, is there a trustworthy replacement?

I don't want an "ad blocker" with blocking lists etc. I just want to see the page I navigated to. And then allow it to load additional resources as I see fit.

If uMatrix goes out of existence, then that would be the biggest loss due to discontinued software in my lifetime.

uBlock origin advanced mode is very similar to uMatrix

AFAICT uBO even in advanced mode doesn't differentiate between the kinds of requests that can be filtered, so filtering is only per domain and filters every kind of request for the domain equally. uM on the other hand differentiates between scripts, CSS, images, XHR, media and frames, and allows you to filter them individually.

But most importantly, uM also allows you to filter cookies with the same fidelity, which is the number one thing I would miss if I had to rely solely on uBO, because it means I can default to blocking even first-party cookies from sites I don't want leaving cookies on my machine. FF by itself gets close, by letting me set a policy that says "block all cookies except for cookies from these domains", but that doesn't let me filter which site is allowed to access those cookies.

Frankly, I find uBO redundant if one has uM installed but for two things: uBO can use the usual content-blocker lists (I personally don't need them because my router's DNS server does filtering using those same lists already, but it's useful for people without such a setup), and uBO can block remote fonts whereas uM can't. It would be great if uM's kind-based filtering was merged into uBO and remote fonts were kept as just another kind of request that can be filtered, but I don't know what gorhill plans to do.

Check out "Cookie AutoDelete" for cookie management. It automatically deletes all cookies (not whitelisted) when you close a website. I've used it for a while and it is pretty nice.

https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete