Chrome has become an absolute pig

I've got a 2021 M1 MacBook Air. Have loved it since I got it. I use it for the usual stuff plus serious software dev (Scala, Rust). It's a powerful machine. In the last month or so Chrome has become almost unusable. I am not one of those \~100 tabs open people - more like 30-40 at the most. So lately when I open a new tab from any number of sites Chrome freezes for five, 10, even 20 seconds. It's unreal. I've done the usual cache purging. Did some recent upgrade foobar the thing? Is there ANY adblock software these days that can actually \*prevent all those damned video ads from starting\*?