Then Google came along promising no intrusive banner ads or popups. They would make their money from quieter personalized ads that knew what you wanted because they had more data about what you were doing. People loved the idea. It was going to save the internet from the horrible advertising industry.

Actually, I seem to remember that these ads were contextual at first, not related to any profile they would have built for you but only related to the content of the page.

Which is entirely different. Ads are still manipulative (by design), but at least purely contextual ads don't track you.

Oh that's right. With gmail, people assumed they would be based on your email contents but sure if Google actually ever did that.

They did. They actually stopped not long ago (2017): https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...

I remember IE6's so-called blocker failing to block a lot of popups. It wasn't until I discovered Firefox in 2004 that I stopped seeing them.