As for you main point about advertising helping me find products I genuinely want/need, this couldn't be further from the truth in my experience. Recently I wanted a new laptop, and one of my criteria was that said laptop should not have pre-installed nonsense like mcafee/Norton(I mean I would be wiping the drive and installing Linux anyway but this is on principle). Anyway it turns out that all large laptop companies install some kind bloatware and also advertise aggressively, so it's quite difficult to search for a laptop without bloatware, since all the ads/seo are for laptops by companies with large advertising budgets and therefore have bloatware. More generally if I'm looking for a product I want there are generally multiple competing providers/manufacturers of said product, and I therefore must figure out which is better, and often there is a clear winner. However the other sides advertising team are incentivized to muddy the waters in this situation making it less obvious which products are best.
Also can you please not yell random words it's actually kind of jarring to read.