I used to regularly read "Astronomy" and "Sky & Telescope", for example, and would have been disappointed if the ads went away. Ads in those magazines were the primary way most amateur astronomers back in, say, the '70s would find good equipment.
Other magazines I would have been disappointed to lose ads from were "Popular Electronics", "Chess Life" and "Byte".
For more general interest magazines, like "Time" or "Newsweek", I don't recall looking forward to the ads like I did for the above mentioned magazines, so wouldn't have minded if they went away. On the other hand, print ads generally weren't intrusive, though, so if they would have had to raise the price of the magazine to get rid of them I would rather keep them.
Although newspapers were general interest, their ads were often useful because they were usually for local things. Remember, back in the day we bought almost everything in person at local stores, so these ads often alerted us to sales and deals that we were interested in.
I'm actually ok with facebook/ig/google adwords ads. I'm not ok with intrusive, redirecting, in your face, ads. I could be alone in this opinion.
If I go to the Economists' website, I will see ads for:
- a university website I went to that dropped a remarketing cookie into my browser
- the shitty dating app full of bots and escorts, that would never have passed a QC review at a publication. Yet they are common on FB and TW (maybe Google Ads is different).
- the tshirt website that displays some machine-generated text based on what it thinks my interests are.
These are what I consider intrusive ads. When I see one, I don't want to have to think about what trail I left that led to these particular ads being shown to me.
I do not remember a time that newspapers and magazines had no ads, despite being paid. If anything many of them were almost half ads, half content.
I was reading magazines since the 90s though, i do not know if things were better before.