I add my take. I started blocking ads so many years ago that I lost the memory of it. It was not for fear of tracking and privacy intrusion. It was to improve the legibility of web pages. Ads pollute them so much more than they did to newspapers. Years after that, I started enjoying the implications of adblocking on privacy and tracking.

I also use uBlock Origin to hide many elements on several pages only to improve legibility, expecially on mobile (hello Medium hosted sites! and many other fixed positioned menus.)

Several companies have done this and the users still scream about it, sometimes more because now they can't block the ads.

The other hard thing for a company is internally, you see normal ad revenue going down and you have some users you can deliver to via some methods. You have to crank that method up to account for it.

Ads is also interesting with the "how much money is enough money" argument. When do you stop monetizing.

I started when x10 camera popups were the thing. Now, it's to control the javascript execution on my computer. It's stupid to allow JS to be run on your computer. (We do it because everything breaks if we don't. But it's still stupid).

My kingdom for a document-oriented web