afaik, modifying css or not loading the advert is the most common adblock approach. To do anything lower level would be far harder.
One of the whole points of adblock is also to reduce bandwidth usage on the client side, increase load speed etc. So if you're using adblock and not loading ads from the server, that behavior is obvious and easily detected.
Advertising works extremely well. A very small minority of users decide to block all advertising without even giving websites the chance to show value in it.
I disagree about adBlock being tech savvy. Most of the time it's just doing regexps on iframe/image sources. Which is ridiculously naive.
Is this an ad? <a href=/foo.html>beds</a>. Definitely could be, yes. Can adblock block it? Nope.
If adblock did become more widespread (I doubt it will), then the advertising would just move server side, and become more hidden so that it can't be detected.
You'll stop seeing <iframe src="http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382>; and you'll start seeing <iframe src="http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html>;
What's this alternate model you've devised for the web? Say we removed all advertising from the web, how much money would we each have to pay a day to replace that revenue? How many of us would be willing to pay to use the web like that? I know I wouldn't.