If I was a responsible advertiser over the last 20 years, I had absolutely no chance to prevent irresponsible people from becoming member of the group you refer to as "advertisers" -- and, at least in the US, if I tried I would probably run afoul of anti-trust or other laws -- so it does not make much sense to say that I "had my chance".

There are good arguments for ad blockers, but treating a collection of independent market participants as if they were a single person or a coherent group able to enforce norms on its members is not one.

I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.)

ADDED. Over the 20 years since the start of advertising on the internet, the actors with the best chance to have headed off the current situation were the maintainers of the popular web browsers, but saying that they had their chance does not help shift the moral high ground from responsible advertisers to users of ad blockers.