You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with.

That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.