I sometimes envy other, more menial jobs because the tools they use day-to-day are still tools designed to help them do their job faster instead of trying to solicit "engagement". Plumbers' wrenches or electricians' screwdrivers don't come with a little screen and buzzer to beep at you every couple hours because you haven't "engaged" with it enough.
In tech and most office jobs we are still forced to use a lot of consumer-grade "tools" (and major operating systems such as Windows, macOS, iOS and Android) which can technically be a lot more efficient (and less annoying) but aren't because of the advertising business model (and the same business model prevents them from offering a paid option).
> I have to say that I love the general notion of advertising: someone who created something awesome pays for my discovery costs.
As a consumer, I don't want to be forced to "discover" your product since in reality this "discovery" deliberately interrupts or slows down whatever other task I'm trying to do. Ironically, when I do want to discover new products, there is no actual "ad search engine" where I can enter a detailed search criteria (against the ads' targeting parameters) to find ads matching it despite it being trivial to build for any of the ad giants.
I don't have any particular problems with old-school print/magazine advertising since those are still within the control of the user - I choose when I have time to look at the magazine and be exposed to its ads and I've already pre-filtered which ads I'll see based on the general topic of the magazine.