When was the last time you died? Death still exists.
I’d be quick to throw digital advertising to the wolves but the reality is that it’s extremely effective. Is there a level of opacity? Yes. Are there tranches of junk traffic and ineffective tools put forth by the ad networks? Absolutely. But these are problems at the margins, and don’t invalidate the fact that advertising on Google and Facebook in particular are very effective, and measurable to enough of an extent that it makes sense to keep doing it and growing your level of investment.
The majority of advertisers both large and small get that they can’t let the quest for perfection in advertising attribution be the enemy of progress.
Their first sentence was more correct: consumers are also getting value and the question is more whether the true cost is worth the benefit. For some people it definitely is, especially those who are skeptical and thus learn/measure/etc themselves. For others they give away far more than they get. For society/humanity as a whole it’s an open question, even more so once you start to include the second-order effects (in both directions, good and bad).
Half of the people on this forum can contradict your comment from experience.