If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. The argument then devolves to "there won't be any good content" but I'll _gladly_ roll the dice on that world to see what we're left with.
It'd be interesting to see if that's true for very many people. As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page.
That way users who don't want to reward content creators with money from adverts would no longer see the content they're refusing to pay for. And if the content creator gives users the option to pay instead of seeing adverts then a simple direct payment would make the site work because the ad blocker would no longer block anything.
I'm actually tempted to give that a try to see what impact it has on my browsing.