Popup Blocker [0] and uBlock Origin for Firefox will do a pretty good job of getting rid of the junk you don't want.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-blocker...
Certainly a reasonable choice on your part. We all want what we want.
I have a friend who, when he goes grocery shopping, grabs the first item he sees from each of the items on his list. As far as I can determine, this is without regard to price, quality, or any other factor.
More profitable for the store. The actual expensive stuff is on the top shelf. Eye level will probably be the store and the national brand which skew average or a little below.
It’s one of the instances where your interests and that of the grocery store are mostly aligned. Grocery store wants you to buy more and rotate inventory not necessarily pay a lot for it.
In my comment, I was thinking of the context of links I click to from HN.
But it also works when searching for information. When I close the tab of an unfriendly site, which, remember, likely has lower-quality information than an accessible one, I am immediately freeing myself to click the next link in the search results and get my information from an accessible site with higher-quality content.
Given the disparity of the quality of content, it is quite likely that I would have ended up at the latter site anyway.
Unless it's a personal site/blog I typically open a site to find information I came for, and close it as soon as that task is done. Anything that makes this take longer than it needs to gets blocked. Sites should strive to stay open for as few seconds/minutes as possible while still giving me the requested information.
Regarding text/image-focused sites that require JS: I generally find sites made by people who haven't figured out how to send text over HTTPS to have low-quality content befitting of their low-quality stacks. I'm all the better for using my adblocker to block them from my search results page forever; it saves me time in the long run.