You can't trust the client. Ads are displayed in the client. It would take hardware level ad serving to make ad serving and anti-ad blocking feasible.
There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.
Maybe now if they served a canvas element, and put all the content in that with animated ads, that would be more bothersome.
Here's the trivial client blocking method: OCR and break the result into different groups by page location, font size and color; the article will be the largest groups of text with the same font. Large images and charts that were part of the original article would be cropped out and re-inserted into the final document. Within a few days you would see a browser extension made with adaptable filtering for most sites that used the monolithic PNG.
Yes, please! If they are going to serve every article as a single static file, then I might actually consider paying for it.
That is, they can negotiate with you using your desire to access their servers as leverage.
You can refuse to negotiate, in which case they can take steps to block your access to their server. You can use technological means to get around that, but then they can adjust their own technology to block your new strategy.
And then you're in a war.
You said "there is no war", but obviously there is.
Your choices are:
* use the servers and look at ads * don't use the servers at all * use the servers and try to block ads
In this third option (which seems to be the one you chose), the people who own the servers can then try to block your access to the site. You can then try to circumvent that block, then they can try to block you again.
This is a war. You said "there is no war".
The subtext here is that, grand proclamations about sovereignty over your computing devices aside, by making other people's servers a crucial component of your computing you are ceding to them some leverage and therefore control.
There is no war, because I'm not going to fight. I'm going to viciously restrict what runs on my system to protect my own security and privacy. If that makes some services or sites become unavailable to me, so be it.