My list of web sites that I actually visit gets smaller and smaller. I have a shortlist and for most of them I pay to remove ads if they have the option and I have all kinds of ad-blocking installed both on the network level and browser level.
Right now I pay for a local news paper, youtube premium (then ad-block the crap out of it), resetera and di.fm (music). HN doesn't have ads afaik and if it does or try to track me it's blocked. I'd pay for a tracking-free version if that was necessary though.
But I do read a lot of books, approximately two a week :) I also play games quite a bit.
And I know I can't escape tracking entirely (ip tracking ++) but can be damn sure I will try my hardest!
I'm sure there are exceptions to this general observation, but I haven't found many (apart from some rare VPNs)
They voluntarily delivered content to my device, in my home. What I do with it after that is my business and no one else's.
It's not freeloading in any sense if I serve my breakfast cereal from mason jars instead of the box. It's not if I tear out pages I don't want to see from a book or if I dump the ad leaflet from the newspaper or credit card offers in the trash. It's not freeloading if I mute the radio during political attack ads. Why should it be any different on my computer screen?
My grandma got an iPad, and was using the calculator app to do her finances. I had a chuckle when I saw she had suck a sticky note over the ad. :-) Do you really see that as freeloading?
Its my house, my stuff, I can do with it exactly as I please, and there is absolutely no sense in which those companies have a "right" to my attention or in which I have some moral obligation to give it. To suggest otherwise sounds like a plot from a science fiction movie. I think Black Mirror had an episode like that.
99% of the places I don't feel bad for "freeloading". It was probably a poor choice of a word.