Programmers don't choose these things, because programmers aren't the real decision makers, it's management and business that makes the web awful.
Depends how much traffic they have I suppose. I'd be pretty excited if ads bought me a Lamborghini for every color of the week because Tuesdays right now are pretty boring.
The one that wants to keep their job.
> How often are programmers arguing for incredibly complex UI elements over the native (and trivial to implement) alternatives?
The existence of Bootstrap and Semantic UI suggest that programmers are in fact often arguing for incredibly complex UI elements over the native alternatives.
I was talking mostly about the actual application logic and presentation.
BTW tracking is hapening even w/o javascript.
So strongly positive, in other words.
One has to remember that marketing and advertising have a big negative-sum-game component going on, where most or all of your marginal effort to promote your product serves only to cancel out the marginal effort of your competitors to promote their products.
It's not just the annoyance factor, it's the bloat from ads. In fact, something like 48% of retrieved data[0], on average is ad related.
Getting rid of those ads could cut client (and server and network) energy draws significantly. And we could further reduce energy usage by not needing add-ons like ad/tracking blockers and stuff like NoScript[1].
I browse with js disabled and, unless I need to visit a particular site, I'll just close the tab if js is required -- as the bloat, the security risks and the hubris of js overuse is just too much.
[0] https://www.nextpit.com/ads-consume-half-of-your-mobile-data
Edit: fixed spacing of referenced links.