The default option should be "show options", letting you choose with
one click between Blank, Mozilla Ads, Your Recent/Favorite Pages, and a custom URL or set of URLs.
There are 6 levels to your process above. Imagine being tech-illiterate and asked to navigate that - or, maybe easier, imagine trying to dictate that process to someone you know who is tech-illiterate over the phone. Even if you know exactly what to do, it might go something like this:
> "You saw an ad you don't like on a new tab of The Internet? OK, what you need to do to fix that is set the New Tab preference to Blank. Click the Firefox menu - no, it doesn't have the familiar File/Edit/Help menu bar, it uses a hamburger menu - the stack of three horizontal lines - in the top right. Something about a library? No, that's supposed to be a bookshelf icon, it has vertical lines, you want the horizontal lines to its right. The menu went away? Make sure to single-click the menu, not double-click. Look in that menu for something named Settings ... not Customize, no, that's kind of like settings but different, oh yeah, it was called Preferences. In Preferences, look for the Home section ... shouldn't have to scroll, it's in the menu to the left ... yeah, that's a menu, it's just separated by whitespace instead of a line. On the Home preferences screen, there's a drop-down box for New Tabs, click that dropdown and set it to Blank. Great, you're all set. Talk to you later. Bye!" Ring - "Hey again - it didn't work? You closed and reopened Firefox and the ads were still there? Oh, right, that gives you a new window, not a new tab. Let's go back through the menus one more time, it was just above the New Tabs dropdown, yeah, we were just there. Click the three horizontal lines for the Firefox menu...."
It's disingenuous to say that those who prefer the ads might not know what they're missing, even more disingenuous to say "you're offered something". No, with ad tech, the user is the product being offered to the advertisers, and I expect that more people don't know how to turn it off or that turning it off is a thing you can do than that like being advertised to.