Until advertisers understand and embrace this, the people that use adblockers will never relent. There is one, let me repeat, one website that I disable adblocking on: reddit.com. I've never been abused by them, and I don't regret that choice. Every other time I've temporarily relented, I immediately regretted it and blocked them again.
I blocked ads on mobile devices when they started buzzing my phone, sending me the the play store, giving me popups, etc.
now I block everything on all my devices using pi-hole
The site gets a chance to impress me with its "engaging marketing experiences" but when I want to read a longer piece I switch to Reader View and all the CPU hogging madness stops.
Obviously, that doesn't protect me against malware, but I have never suffered a successful malware attack so far in spite of using the web basically 16 hours a day.
I also sometimes get email spam ads from a forum I use. But the advertisers buy access to the mailout directly from the forum owners and the forum owners personally screen them to make sure they're relevant to their audience.
There are cases that still exist which sound like your former experience. They're not horrible, just inconvenient.
There was a time that might have worked. It would have worked with me, anyway. A time when others were using ad blockers, but I had an attitude of "meh, they gotta pay the bills". I might pay a little money to turn off the ads, and were I to use an ad blocker I might whitelist a site or two.
But a threshold was crossed. I can't tell you what that threshold looks like, or name any particular event that set me off. Maybe it's the malware, maybe it's the jiggling belly fat ads, auto-play videos, I dunno. But at some point I said "enough", and I quit giving a shit about anything to do with that industry. The well has been so poisoned that I don't care about finding an antidote anymore. In general, I don't care if websites go under. The poisoned well metaphor breaks down in that I can't do without water, but I can sure as hell do without most of the ad-laden websites out there. I'll miss them, but not enough to be bothered to expend even the minimal effort to whitelist as site.
I don't want to be that person. I want to be empathetic to at least the small content producers just trying to scrape a few bucks. But I've been worn down, and not in the way the advertising industry wished I had been worn down. No, I'm worn down such that it's just easier to run an ad blocker and quit caring. And it's unfortunate that companies like yours get caught in all of it.