Here you answered it yourself why people adblock. If ads were served on either side of the holy grail layout like the good ol days it wouldnt have been such a pain in the ass.
I remember jumping on the ad-blocking wagon when google started serving their shitty ads in between scroll content, serving diseased peoples photo ( ketto.org ) and getting frighteningly accurate/curated ads of what I searched for previously. Literally fuck google for having a digital private investigator on my ass 24/7 just to sell me shit. I am gonna use ad-blocker till the end of time.