And he/she/it seems happy also to allow arbitrary code to run on his/her/its machines. I may even accept getting occasionally distracted by benign ads (just plain text or images or even videos as on newspapers/TV) but I cannot and will not accept advertisers or their agents running their arbitrary code on my machines at all.

I fully support adblockers.

If you took a look at the inbox of an ordinary consumer, you'd see lots of desired ads – in my case, a weekly email from a high end audio shop I like.

You may assiduously unsubscribe from all unsolicited email, but most do not. For most people, what is in Gmail's spam folder is genuine junk – emails from Nigerian princes, emails in cyrillic, etc.