The thing about ads is that quite often whatever you will pay to remove it, someone will pay more to put it back. Paying to remove ads is a signal that you’re the exact kind of person they want to send ads to. So not having ads has to both be either a moral position instead or a long term sustainability position. Microsoft expect their monopoly status to sustain them and have been ratcheting up their abuse of their monopoly to extract more money. In my view they’re on track to losing that privilege.
Just recently YouTube has started blocking videos due to add blocker presence. I already pay producers via patreon and I guess I will just go watch over there. YouTube is a bad habit I need to break and their new policy will help me do that.
Oh, and while I’m shitting in windows; the defender has made file access almost unusably slow, and I get intermittent stuttering both in games and with music on an absolute overkill of a computer speced this way precisely because it needs to run windows.