>> but if a site is not ad-supported, and "paywall" is almost an epithet (and circumvented to boot), how is any site supposed to remain viable?

They're not. Think about news sites that rewrite stories from paywalled sites and collect ad revenue. They are parasites that make money from other peoples work. Same thing for all those YouTube channels (though they are not other sites) that repackage other peoples content and make money doing so.

What we need is not so much a way to advertise on the net, but a way to make small payments and subscriptions simple. If sites needed their users to pay them, the quality of the content might go up dramatically. Places like HN could still exist just fine too.

Having said that, I think there are ways to verify ads without cookies and such. It's just that it takes more effort on the server side.