I've been working in software development for about 15 years now and have yet to work for a single company funded through advertising dollars. It's not a foregone conclusion, you just have to choose to work for better companies.
These are first-derivative bullshit jobs. My job provides an useful service in that it enables other people to do their bullshit jobs. Those jobs do not need to exist, and if they didn't, my job would not need to exist, either.
Just like advertisement tricks you into buying things you don't need, the advertisement-funded internet tricks you into paying attention to things you don't care about. We're better off without.
My perspective is that advertising sets a perverse incentive to create content that is indexable and clickable (machine-translated Stack Overflow answers, recipes with twelve paragraphs of backstory, fake download links for the latest Marvel movie) instead of content that is valuable.
While I would agree that advertising can result in distorted priorities it isn't inherently evil. We used to have an internet with both ads and rational incentives. Even then the value of the internet service could not cover itself without advertising.
The main point though was that the cost of the internet is a mix of direct and indirect cost. I seriously doubt there will be enough people willing into incur the direct cost for modern services at a level that will co er those indirect cost incurred by the network and content providers.
While an ad free internet sounds great it isn't very practical or necessary. The answer is on the user end rather than the provider end though. Stop rewarding the perverse incentives instead of pretending we can wish them away.