Worked once I realized I needed to select both sections of the menu to block the site I was on when enabling this extension. No more forced videos while scrolling through the news site. Video placeholders still pop up but at least the annoying noisy videos do not load nor play.

finally an addon which disables video entirely and not just autoplay, very helpful for avoiding getting distracted by netflix or youtube, seems to behave strangely when video and audio are globally allowed but otherwise does what iv been looking for! thank you abdullah : -)