Not for me, it doesn't, For me, it comes from an "I don't want to be spied on" mentality.
If the online ad world would do everything that they currently do, but actually leave me out of it when I tell them to, I wouldn't consider them to be evil. But not only don't they do that, they put a lot of time, effort, and money into actively working around the various defenses I put up against them.
> I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view
You're talking as if the problem is the ads themselves. It's not. It's the spying that's the problem.
> The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory
I don't assert that it's not elegant. I assert that it's deeply unethical unless informed consent has been obtained from the people the data is being gathered from.
> then people ask "where did the old internet go"?
People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it.
> it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".
Plenty of proven alternatives are brought up all the time. Even the IAPP article here mentions the strongest one: have ads, but don't target them based on data extracted from unwilling participants. Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.
Just like newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.
The adtech world doesn't want to do that because they can make even more money by being bastards, instead.