I agree. There are some add-ons that spoof/disable this header for you, but as you said, this breaks some sites. I agree, as a consumer, that website that rely on the header are out of luck with regards to my business, but at work I don't always have a choice with regards to which online tools we use. But white listing the things that break is a fine solution in that case.
I forge the referer as the root of the site, except in the case of news sites that allow referers from google news to bypass the paywall, in which case I always forge that. This very rarely breaks anything (one out of a million sites expect an external or specific referer.)
