Advertising is just distributing a message, a small subset of marketing in general. And marketing is connecting consumers to services/products they want and need. Creating brands and desires is a separate art within it but saying it's just a system to sell some toilet paper is incredibly reductive and I'm sure you know it's not that simple.
Surveillance is the act of monitoring, not the system itself. So yes, unfortunately anything that has a large surface area of data access will be at the mercy of greater actors who might (forcibly or otherwise) use that access for surveillance. There's nothing special about online advertising here, rather this is an issue about personal rights, laws and the government in general.
ABP does have a weakness when it comes to privacy clarifications - and as I've said before I'm not a fan of them or their approach - however since the list only allows certain ad networks, it greatly cuts down on the number of trackers since they would still remain blocked. The hope is to get greater rules put in place (by the entire industry) but we have to start somewhere or this never gets off the ground.
I do have a question thought - as a someone in the ad industry, do you ever think to yourself: "We've built the largest surveillance system the world has ever known... for the purpose of selling vacuum cleaners and toilet paper."
[1] https://acceptableads.com/en/about/criteria
Edit: For the record, I whitelist ad networks like The Deck in all my ad blockers, because their privacy policy meets my definition of acceptable tracking (http://decknetwork.net/privacy/).