That's fair. I think all advertising is naturally bad for the world, but you're right that it's the combination of advertising and greed that created the extremely deleterious environment we have now.

That said, greed fed by other monetization models would not have produced the attention economy, and I don't think the evils of other models (dark patterns for subscriptions, planned obselescence, etc) could have come close to the society-wide damage that the attention economy has caused.