I'm building this whole platform with tens of thousands of lines of code, which (in my opinion) is pretty unique, I use it every day with a couple of people that visit, but it's designed to handle much more. I'm not getting anything in terms of money out of it, if anything I'm losing money by hosting and stuff. I'll leave the link here: https://github.com/madprops/Hue . Also there's other successful open source solutions that are having a big impact right now, like Mastodon, it's a very active Twitter alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)

It's part of the natural move towards a centralized web. You want a website you can trust that delivers good content, as do other people, increasing the load on the host beyond minimal finance resulting in ads. That said a lot of sites aren't that trustworthy and don't deliver good content but are riddled with ads to try and make money

These sites are still there. In fact, many more of them, since the cost of hosting has dropped to near zero, especially for static content.

The new development is huge sites providing expensive content and services for free, and using ads and tracking to pay for it.

Besides the entire news industry? YouTube? Most informational sites besides Wikipedia? How about Google Search? Believe it or not, it costs money to run a business and not everything makes sense as a subscription model or pay-as-you-go.