Since you can't avoid having these ads/brand placed in your preferred social media platform (the users are the product (to be sold to advertisers) and not the customers), the next best thing that you can do as a user is to subvert the undesired brands that you see in your social media stream (e.g. by posting something that makes fun of an ad that you see) to make the social media platform a less desirable place for the respective undesired advertiser.
If I e.g. comment on a photo that my brother posted, I absolutely don't want any of his other random acquaintances to also see that. And also the other way around, if my friends comment something on my photo I don't want my brother to see that.
Private groups are the only way to avoid that. Or maybe a system like G+ had with the Circles, so I could e.g. share tech things only with my techie friends without bothering my aunt with it.
All people don’t want brands in their closed communities!
Anecdotally I strongly agree with the article. I pretty much only use Discord and group texts anymore among friends and family (though I do self host and share on Mastodon/Pixelfed/Lemmy it’s a fraction). Any time I poke around on traditional social media it just feels like a wasteland, 90% ads/curated content. Fine if you want to go read a magazine for a bit I guess but a shell of what it was like a decade ago.