1. it's orthogonal to relevance of content (semi-solvable algorithmically I suspect) 2. it's antithetical to Google's core business model (a lot tougher nut to crack)
The entire point of my comment was that it's not orthogonal. The ads are what fuels the click bait and SEO-driven articles. Nobody for example would ever pay a subscription to a website that is just waffle filler. While stackoerflow has ads, it's much better in that regard to the SEO spam pages.
I hate ads, but I don't think we should be focusing on them here. Some sites that have ads have garbage content, and some sites that have ads have useful content. Just... find the useful content, and return it in search results. I know "just" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there, but I don't think "has/does not have ads" is as important a signal to a search engine's algorithm as you think it is.
I disagree. The way content is presented matters. Splitting an article into 4-6 pages and filling those pages with ads makes me not want to read that content. I'd much rather go somewhere that has the same text in a single page and only a few ads.