And that is both a user-respecting and effective way to advertise!

This would have been true for this change as well, clearly if Apple chose a different path means that it's not as clear cut as you imply here. And yeah contextual and stuff is nice but will simply not drive the same revenue for publishers.

This isn't true, targeted advertising only gets publishers about 4% more revenue, despite adtech's claims it's over 50%. And when adtech is banned, revenues will stabilize around remaining activity.

You deliberately choose to ignore all of the studies that disagree with you except the one that you agree with that has very obvious flaws. Here's a summary of the literature[1]. Personalized ads have become popular because they perform better for the buyer, and that makes buyers willing to pay more to show them to their customers. Buyer goals align with conversions. The history of advertising online started with contextual, there is zero evidence to support the claim that revenue will only drop 4% when any company submitting bids for contextual vs personalized ads can show you that the CPMs they are willing to pay can easily be 2-3x if not even higher for high worth users.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1juu6UBguR7ru1Rhfyor9...

Ads have effectively disappeared for a number of years now for those who use a sensible approach to ad blocking (i.e. a combination of ingress blocking, DNS blacklists and browser-based blocking). This could change if content providers start using different approaches to ad insertion - e.g. video ads merged into the original content, ads as part of original page content - but even those avenues will be neutered within not too long. It probably makes sense for ad purveyors to not fret too much over ad blocking users since these users often react negatively to advertising and as such are better left alone.

In most cases I find direct ad insertion (as in ad sponsership of the creator) a lot less offensive than some algorythmetic insertion based on some unknown metric. At least then the creator has to decide if the ad they are running is acceptable in their product.

That isn't ad insertion but sponsorship. What I mean is for the server to present a single video stream which does not contain markers to identify advertising content, more or less the way many netcast ads are inserted into the audio stream.

> video ads merged into the original content

That is already a thing and there are already countermeasures: https://sponsor.ajay.app

> Ads will definitely not disappear, only the tracking aspect.

Ads without tracking are an even less effective business model. We don't have to make ads stop working entirely, we just have to make them sufficiently ineffective that they're not worth paying enough to make ad revenue worthwhile.

Not with that attitude they won't.