It’s not extreme at all. Ad people justify what they do as informing the public of new products. So let ads be regulated to plain black text on a white background to be shown only on ad pages that people must specifically visit, and we’ll see the truth of that assessment.

The real truth of advertising is that it is engineered to exploit flaws in the human psyche to hack a human into acting against their own best interests. To buy a product they don’t need, or to vote for a candidate that will harm them. It is toxic, and those who create it and distribute it are toxic.

Hacker News, where the problem with lying to people to sell them inferior products they don't need is that it costs too much.