I had an exchange with Darren Herman at Mozilla about these issues back in 2014 when they had just started the nonsense of calling ads “content discovery”. If memory serves these were for the first time on the new tab page.

It was my position that ads violate the ethos of free software by making the user serve the software. You can debate that, but in any case that was the beginning of this culture at Mozilla to use bs language to placate users.