We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole.
You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
> If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist.
Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.
My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really.
If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.