Yes it is. I remember conversations here on HN years ago where some would argue that people in fact loved ads.
Now it seems this line of argument is gone for good. Everybody agrees ads are horrible.
The only question that remains is, are they indispensable? I think not. We'll see.
Without ads, businesses will put up subscription-only features and paywalls. People hate those too. But we need to accept the fact that businesses can't make money by giving everything away for free. I'd rather put up with ads than see the internet devolve into paywalls on most sites -- paywalls are more annoying to work around.
On the other hand, if I'm reading an aggregator like Google News, the interesting thing is that the top article for a particular sub-topic might be from the NYT or another site with a paywall, but if you look down the list you can get a similar article from a non-paywalled site. The cool thing about this is I get exposed to a bunch of random sources, and often they are local news sites.
I've looked into subscribing to some sites, but most want north of $10 per month, some in the $20-$30 per month range, and I just don't get that much value out of them to justify paying, especially when I'd end up having to pay for several of them, which would add up to several hundred dollars a month. It's still a real shame that micropayments isn't a thing; I wouldn't have an issue reading the first paragraph or two of an article, and then having to spend something like 5c to 25c to read more. I fully understand why micropayments haven't taken off, but it's a shame nonetheless.
Of course some content on e.g. Youtube is now partially funded by ad-revenue but that seems like something that happened more or less accidentally, and it has some undesirable consequences (hence why people are increasingly trying out other revenue streams).
One size doesn't fit all though