You are looking at this from the point of view of the user (where ads are not a big deal in exchange of consuming the content for free), but step for a moment i

You are looking at this from the point of view of the user (where ads are not a big deal in exchange of consuming the content for free), but step for a moment in the content creators' shoes. While Ads can still be profitable, they grow less and less efective year after year; almost every other monetization model possible is superior for an internet product nowadays. You can easily run a blog with millions of hits per month and still not make enough to work on it full time. It's shitty if you are the content creator and can only monetize via ads.