In addition to that, digital advertising is different from all predecessors in a couple of ways which make it very unpalatable to the target users.

First off, it's the target who wears the majority of the costs. Extra bandwidth to serve the ad, extra cpu/battery resources to display it, extra exposure to trackers and malicious js - all on the target.

Then there's the tracking. You don't just get shown an ad, your browser receives a huge payload of javascript intended to track your behavior on and off the site where the ad was shown. This allows large ad networks like Google to track you virtually everywhere you go online - the ads shown are almost irrelevant compared to the value derived from this data.

And finally, as parent post mentions, there's a complete lack of checks and balances. Anyone can advertise anything, which is why a huge portion of ads are for scams, and most of the remaining portion are for products and services that one cannot legally advertise on traditional media.

Given all of the above, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for consumers to block and continue blocking digital ads as long as it remains technologically possible. There is no legal recourse here - visiting a website doesn't imply consent to downloading and displaying that website how the owner wants.

There's this persistent sentiment of 'oh but if users continue blocking ads then these websites will go out of business'. Yeah? Then so be it. If their business model is only sustainable through fucking their users in the ass, and they will go out of business if consumers don't bend over, then they shouldn't exist in the first place. The internet was just fine before it was taken over by corporate interests, and it will continue being just fine if most of them stop operating there because they're can't monetize it. It's an information sharing platform, there was never a promise of it being a profit platform.

And it only gets worse with time. Over the past decade, I went from no adblock, to a blacklist, to a whitelist, and finally to just blocking everything except a very very short list of sites I consider trusted (Reddit being one of them) that I no longer update. If a site doesn't let me view content without ads, I don't visit it. I have yet to run into a situation where the content was worth the exposure to risk and the financial cost of ads (mobile data caps).

Ad networks consistently shit in the community well, and act outraged when people sell bottled water.