I can see that if you consider ads to be inherently offensive, you would notice them wherever they appear, and be annoyed.

But that's not where most people are.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as potholes on the road, since ads are more predictable.

Think of it as the difference between a for-profit bank and a credit union. The bank exists to maximize returns for its shareholders. The credit union exists solely for benefit of its members. So the credit union isn't going to try to employ sneaky fine-print fees, because that's not what the members want.

In a similar vein, you might not care about ads and may have trained yourself to ignore them, but you might care about performance, which is sluggish because of all the cruft, or you might care about privacy, or you might care about being marketed to in more subtle ways than display ads.