However, I agree with you that display ad networks suck. I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. The happy medium is to have users pay for content, making it so advertisers don't need to track users to verify that they're real humans, and improving the web for everyone except poor people.
One way that this could be done is to use bitcoin for tiny micropayments, billed frictionlessly. Rough for legal reasons among others, but ideas like this are sensible if only for human verification reasons.
If you want the web to largely free content, to pay for that you must accept privacy-destroying ad networks to bear that cost. We've created a situation where the choice is to free ride on other people, or to surrender privacy.
If you want the web to be largely teasers for paid content, then you can have significantly more privacy also. Instead of the articles being articles, you will get articles that are actually big ads for paid content (already the case for a huge number of popular search results).
Spreading tools like these kills free content like snaps fingers loudly that. I'm indifferent. Users might not be.