Well, it looks like they succeeded in their goal which was to funnel traffic to their site. It's now a top post on HN, with a top comment directly linking to their site, and I'm sure it will be shared in other places. This is partly why I'm not sure about blocking ads. I'd rather have ads be ads, and not have to read everything like it's a research paper to know if it's secretly an ad. Aside from personal blogs and forums, a lot of the internet is an ad in one way or another, although forums are also becoming more ad-y.

Lol. But the author is also using Fathom on that same site, not sure I understand the need for both The Beast and Fathom.

To be honest, I also advocate pro-privacy and have built a self-hosted analytics platform, BUT I still have sites on which I have Google Ads and Google Analytics. I still have them on mostly because I don't maintain them anymore, and spending the time to fix and remove all 3rd party dependencies for a site that I don't maintain anymore is not really something I want to do. The alternative would be to completely delete the site, but it still has useful information for some people so I keep it alive.