Seems like Drudge is all ads, all the time. And if you go to a site, there’s another bunch of them. I am starting to stay away, frankly. I read the site but do not click.
Drudge has remarkably few ads.
Drudge's problem is the annoying auto-refresh every other minute. But that's easily solved with a trivial browser extension. And it's only a problem if you leave him up. Why would you do that?
And if you go to a site, there’s another bunch of them.
That's not Drudge's problem. That's a general problem!
Sites keep loading indefinitely, even though you don't see much of anything new. Your CPU fans spin up. Scrolling gets laggy. Your browser scarfs up memory! It's the problem of the runaway ad-tech engines that the moron webmasters have been persuaded to install. You check your browser's Network tab and see megabytes and megabytes of who knows what being downloaded.
You have two choices: ad-blockers or the nuclear option.
The nuclear option is, you disable JavaScript for the offending site. Ad-tech engines are JavaScript monstrosities. No JavaScript, no ad-tech. But nuclear is famous for collateral damage. E.g., videos don't play, images are gone or blurry, menus don't open.
It's quite possible to remedy these effects using content scripts (e.g., one major ancient conservative journal shows a white screen with JS turned off, but that's because they set body to display:none — trivial to fix with a content script). But it does take effort.
Might as well use an ad-blocker. These do not block JS, but prevent loading the ad-tech engines using a black list of IP addresses.