Firstly 'very mild annoyance' for you maybe, I'd rather eat bricks then watch the endless ads and popups. Now a good old advertisement, like you'd get in magazines, target based on context are fine. Even some TV commercials are fine, I'd rather not have 20 minute on the hour of them, but meh.

It's all the low effort, spammy targeted crap that is the problem imo.

And 'ads also help small businesses to grow' is bs if you ask me.

- online ads are largely for the big business as small business gets crowded out & out-spend on search terms etc.

- targeted ads do not contribute meaningfully to conversion if you look close enough. Conversion metrics are crap as they do not account for the huge selection bias involved.

- marketing in general contributes nothing to society, it is all busy-work that changes nothing but maybe moving some people around between brands. It is a zero-sum game where the everybody keeps spending more and more and more for less impact & the market as whole is not impacted.

- 70 to 90% of all clicks & impressions are by bots.

- Content creators get jack shit for advertisements, if you pay like 1$ a month for someone's patreon or whatever you are generating more revenue then watching a thousand ads.

And then there is all the nefarious uses of targeted advertising that follow from it...