In Firefox, you just need to left-click and hold the back button to get a list that allows you to go back to any of several earlier pages. Pretty handy.

Occasionally even that hasn't saved me, but I suppose it's pretty close to the optimal UI. Maybe it just needs to partition the history entries by domain to defeat the sites that spam the hell out of your history.

This is the same in Brave (and I'd assume Chrome as well). You can also just right click on the back button.

Bigger issue isn’t the browser, your ISP can issue a deep cookie, you’ll have to VPN to get around that.

But a lot load balancers now fingerprint VPN addresses so that doesn’t work either

I think you're talking about a different problem. Here I'm not talking about tracking, just websites that hijack the back button.