Frankly, yes. Lichess is such a relief because I know it's a place I can go without someone trying to sell me something.
I did, but if at some point they will have to add some ad, I won't consider that awful if done in the right way.
Why? Plenty of sites are able to survive solely on a donation model, even large ones. Look at Wikipedia.
Modest ads wouldn't be a problem if I hadn't seen so many major sites follow a slippery slope from that to obnoxious ads and heavy tracking.
After all, ad money $ will show up instantly and measurably in an A/B test or project outcome, while turned-off users, lost trust, garish design and poor performance have much subtler, harder to measure impacts.
And before you know it you're a newspaper website with 20 tracking scripts, or youtube with ads layered on ads layered on ads.
Naroditsky isn't paying you to promote his stream, so it doesn't qualify as an ad as ads are being referred to in lichess's post
Let me do some advertising right now. Daniel Naroditsky's twitch stream is amazing. Go watch 'em https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky
(If you're into chess, you almost certainly already know about him.)
He also gets into feuds with Hikaru and won't shut up about him for some reason nowadays, and is constantly on a soapbox, but whatever. The chess is fun to watch.
Now, if you saw a banner ad for that on lichess, would you really feel awful about it? I mean, that's a fine perspective, but I'm of the opinion of "just shovel all the content in front of me and let me pick out what I like." It works wonderfully on YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
But of course, your feelings are justified for modern ads as currently implemented. Mobile games are just a complete horror fest now. (It was delightful to discover Cardinal Quest 2, since every aspect of the game can be played without paying a cent or seeing an ad. It's more or less "chess, but with monsters.")