Unless enough people all pay, the whole thing stops working. But there aren’t enough people who will pay because most people don’t care.
Tldr: the ad supported business model fundamentally doesn’t work if you let all your best products (you) opt out by paying. It requires them to pay an amount far in excess of what they would be willing to pay for the system to work.
The modern maxim is: any content platform large enough to host an ad sales department will sell ads
Vanishingly few (valuable) consumers have zero tolerance for ads, so not selling ads means leaving huge sums of money on the table once you get to a certain scale. Large organizations have demonstrated that they can't resist that opportunity.
The road out is to either convince everyone to have zero tolerance for ads (good luck), to just personally opt for disperse, smaller vendors that distinguish themselves in a niche by not indulging, or to just support and use adversarial ad blockers in order to take personal control. Hoping that the next behemoth that everybody wants to use will protect you from ads is a non-starter. Sooner or later, they're going to take your money and serve you ads, just like the others.
Google will suck all your data even if you pay, and link the entire earth of services to your identity.
For now, chatgpt doesn't care, and I already pay for what they provide.
May they kill Google.
20 years old me would freak out hearing me that, they used to be my heroes.