> ads are not bad.

Highly debatable, IMO. They're already a net negative for society on their own. We'd probably have a healthier Internet if ads didn't create incentives for social media companies to get their users addicted to serve them more ads.

> now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience .... the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad

This has always been possible and, from my recollections, was how some early online advertising was done. (I don't know if it was ever the dominant model, but it was certainly more common.)

I suspect the difficulty connecting content providers with advertisers is the root of them problem. After that, it takes effort to maintain that relationship. Having a third party handle everything is simply easier, especially for smaller web sites and smaller companies who want to advertise.

> ads are not bad

Ads are noise deliberately added to the signal. They're content you did not seek out and probably don't want. All advertisements are inherently untrustworthy: they're getting paid to sell you something, naturally they will exaggerate the positives and downplay the negatives. Conflicts of interest doesn't even begin to describe it.

That's the charitable interpretation. One could describe advertising as mind rape. You don't consent to it, you don't want it. They just keep trying to forcibly insert the data into your mind anyway. You block them, they bypass your blocker, which arguably makes them malware as well.

They feel entitled to our cognition, memories, attention. They think it's theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. They make it even harder for people with attention deficit to concentrate by trying to forcibly grab their attention. It's not only an accessibility problem, it's also a form of aggression, which makes uBlock Origin a form of justified self-defense.