It is systemic, but I think you underestimate how deeply the adtech money and everything surrounding it is embedded in our mindset. It's essentially the Goodhart's Law taken to the extreme, where every single new iteration of the system brings in new middlemen, new misaligned incentives, then putting those middlemen between the person providing a service and the person who'd like to pay for it.
Here's an exercise: try to draw a diagram of all parties required to display a video ad on your page. I suggest starting with the OpenRTB and VAST specs. It's creepy.
The biggest shame here is that most people are convinced that we need advertising because otherwise people would not pay for content.