"Ad blockers are unethical—ads are how they pay to keep the lights on!”

Exactly. It's how THEY pay to keep the lights on. It's not how I pay for anything. I didn't agree to see ads, although I'm ok with some ads; what I definitely didn't do is agree to be tracked and profiled and have arbitrary third-party code running on my computer just so I could read this awful, pointless, SEO-ified shitfest of an article that doesn't come close to answering the question I was googling.

#enshittification

@maxleibman I'd be totally fine with having a browser setting where I can put a shopping list that gets passed through http headers for sites to serve relevant ads. My list under my control and they get to make me offers I want to see.

All this adtech stuff is just busy work for middle managers who want to keep themselves in jobs.