that's kind of an ivory tower argument. "let's people don't have nice thing, we know what's best for them." meanwhile, most normal use don't gives a damn if the site track their behavior and post relevant ads, as long as they get quality content and ads aren't abusive they believe it's a fair bargain.

No, more like "instead of trying to tame bad actors making compromises, we refrain from them and tell others to do so too".

"ads aren't abusive"

"believe"

Believe it or not, some people make high-quality content on the internet with the expectation of compensation.

The current state of advertising is ethically and technically questionable in many ways. But the idea of advertising as a revenue model is not.

Ethical advertising is pretty much a unicorn. I don't deny that it's possible but I would struggle to find even a single example of it in the wild.

I guess Deck Network was an example of that. Most of the 5-6 ads I intentionally clicked ever was theirs. There were also similar networks like Carbon.