Agreed. The especially weird thing for me is that when I suggest ads are perhaps not great, I get energetic replies along the lines of "why do you hate newspapers/TV/video and want to kill them!1!"
I think of the ad ecosystem as like a tree that has grown so tall and dense that little can grow beneath it. If that tree weren't there I don't think we'd have nothing. I think we'd have a richer ecosystem with many more things growing.