Google the search engine could exist without being a privacy pest. But once Google bought DoubleClick in 2002 and made their ad delivery platform their own, going down the panopticon path became inevitable.
Curiously, they had a solution of sorts in a program where you could basically bid for your own ad buys to remove ads from pages. For some reason they shuttered this program down. I didn't even know it existed until after it was gone, frustratingly. I thought it was a neat way to allow the industry bridge to other funding models.
(Or perhaps such a business model relies on tracking that's been deemed invasive. Who knows.)
Because in reality this is just an opt in donation to Google. It's always cheaper to just block ads entirely.