It's not just ads but plenty of dark patterns. At some point as a user you no longer have much control and no longer get what you were looking for and decide to leave. But the slow boiling leaves a lot of frogs in the pan, it will probably be a slow decay before death. To me browsing the net is unusable without ad blockers but there are many users out there who don't know what ad blockers are.
People didn’t stop using Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and a myriad other services and products (and things like TV before those) because they got ads.