they are irritating, but there are extensions to most browsers to get rid of them. this page got me to add esources.infolinks.com to my JavaScript Blacklist set.
it would, of course, be better if people stopped doing the stupid thing in the first place...
Every time I hovered over one of those underlined ad words in the article, a popup blocked my view of the article. It was really distracting.
I got fed up with it after the 5th time and closed the tab. I expect many technically-inclined people did the same.