These are all very fair questions.

You find ways to mentally make it not about the adware. You're building a monetization system that allows other software makers to continue their craft!

No one wants adware.

I think my first response supports your notion of a reality distortion field. People try and forget its adware and think more about the cool technical challenges (millions of installs per day!) or reframe it to not be about the adware.

The meetings were never openly malevolent towards users and there was a legal team to make sure user rights were never actually violated. People would come to our meetings and they would never realize we were an adware company, it just sounded like normal ad tech.