A company forthrightly saying that something the company previously did (under different ownership) was unethical, and they are hereby ceasing it immediately, is rare, and refreshing. It should be celebrated.
Brave.
Trust is a very hard thing to rebuild, especially straight out of the gate. I'm hopeful, with a healthy dose of skepticism. These are some of the first communities I heavily engaged with, in what feels like a lifetime ago.
Part of it comes from not knowing who the new owners are, outside of a nebulous LLC that owns a lot of internet property. What is their actual intent with these properties? Why would they buy SF and not have an immediate roadmap to share? /. is one thing, it's a news aggregation and comment based community. SF, though, that's something completely different. SF isn't a property you just buy and then start crowdsourcing ideas on how to improve/redesign/resurrect. From a skeptical point of view, it could appear as though it was bought because of it's traffic, and now someone has to figure out what to do with it. That's not a promising perspective.
They've taken positive steps already, and promise more. That's why I'm hopeful, but it's really easy to start thinking apart an acquisition like this because of the current lack of transparency from the new owner. Ask yourself how you would approach the purchase of a property like SF. I would guess you'd know why you wanted to purchase it, and what you were going to do with it; and I'd wager it'd be more than just removing the bundleware, adding https, and promising to fix the bad ad model. These are great things, and sorely needed, but it doesn't instill a sense of real vision.
We're at HN, a place where many of us have made our living hacking things, learning, and outsmarting others, or having vision that nobody else did. Sometimes those awesomely positive things can bring out the inner skeptic.
...and what I mean by vision/roadmap is something like before deciding to buy SF I reached out to Gitlab to foster a mutually beneficial partnership, I have a plan for building up the community ala stackex, I've reached out to several large projects that left SF to inquire about their concerns/issues/complaints and see if I can salvage those relationships, etc. These are things that would be priorities, and actually just part of due diligence, especially before purchase. Instead, we have what we have, and time will tell.
I wish you the best of luck though because it would be doubly sad if you guys sold it to someone who put all the crapware right back.