But on the other hand, there are non-intrusive ads that are text or simple image based ones. Those ads get hit in the cross-fire of ad-blocking.
Most of the sites that are producing content charge nothing from the user except for in the form of advertising. That's not a big ask most of the time.
It's like Google providing this amazing service, of cataloging and indexing THE ENTIRE INTERNET and providing relevant and fast search results to everyone, and all they ask is that users are displayed simple text ads. It's not a big ask for the service they provide.
I realize you can whitelist sites with ad-block. BUT, if you are going to a webpage to read and ingest content, I would argue that morally the transaction is to disable ad-block to view the content.