> Targeted ads that profile me as someone who buys things in the niche I buy things are good.

I don't think so. There's a fundamental conflict of interest between the entity paying for the ad, the entity serving the ad, and the people seeing it. Their goal is to ultimately get ad viewers to spend the most amount of money, which may or may not be aligned with their interests. The advertiser has an incentive to convince them to buy something, whether that will benefit them or not.

I believe convincing customers to buy something is a much bigger sales driver than solving problems for them, unfortunately. And those two seem to go to hand in hand less and less as time passes.