Host based blocking can never be as complete as blocking inside your browser and there is no way around that. The reason is that host based blocking falls short where tracking content and ads are served from the same hostname as the actual content. Furthermore, some tracking hosts might be whitelisted because just blocking them would break functionality.

I personally use uBlock Origin with ETP at its default setting, which works well for me without breakage, but judging from your post you might be looking for a solution without browser extensions. The ETP tracking protection is supposed to block tracking, sometimes without letting the website know that it’s disabled, by replacing the tracking code with dummy code. On strict mode you run more risk of things breaking, similar to how strict host based blocking breaks some websites.