Wow, thanks for the really long and thoughtful answer!

I think your answer made me realize something which might explain some of the different viewpoints we have.

You seem to have the general idea that, with some exceptions, ads are useful. This reminds me of my experience of doing a coast-to-coast road trip in the US and being amazed at how many more signs with ads I would see by the road and inside towns, compared to Europe. I was also fascinated by the radio ads, as everything was so different than what I was used to. The amount, creativity and sheer diversity of ads was astounding and something to behold.

As a tourist, I associate these ads positively in my mind because in many cases, I would have no idea of all the different things that there were around me if I didn't see those ads, like restaurants, museums, supermarkets, local attractions, etc. A few of these ads were extremely useful, but many were also interesting because it made me experience a part of American culture that I wouldn't experience otherwise, including its great capitalistic nature (I love capitalism itself) and all the variety of businesses that there were. Perhaps with the occasional exception, I don't recall these ads being obnoxious.

My experience with ads as a European citizen is the polar opposite. Here, I don't find them useful at all. I always see all the same ads, all the time. They're repetitive, loud, obnoxious, with no creativity, no diversity and transmit no useful information.

It's mostly large, multinational companies, with the occasional local or national company whose ad you see or hear over and over again, thousands of times, to the point of exhaustion. This is especially true in TV, radio (including online radio) and also the same outdoor signs which you always encounter when driving to the same spots.

If you've seen one Coca Cola ad, you've seen all the other thousand of them, basically. Especially when they are exactly the same ad. But I can't turn them off. It can get quite maddening when your favorite local radio only has 3 ad spots and they're always the exact same obnoxious ads, for months on end.
Or when you're watching TV and it goes to commercials and you always see exactly the same $huge_company ads, in the same exact order, over and over again.

Online ads, such as in Youtube or social platforms, can in most cases be a similar experience. In my subjective experience, it seems like I've been exposed to 1000x more Coca Cola, Burger King, and $giant_car_brand type ads than things which could actually be useful to me.

Really, the only memorable experiences which begin to approach your arguments in favor of useful ads is if, say, I'm watching some video or podcast about some really niche topic and most or all the ads are related to that topic. The vast majority of these are still completely useless to me, but at least I don't find these as obnoxious as the generic ones as long as they're not too repetitive or in-your-face (which unfortunately is also common).

I also have the anecdotal experience of buying many different types of ads for a local business of an acquaintance, for extended periods of time, to see what worked and what didn't. This includes times when it was just physical ads (geographically constrained), or just online ads, in different ad platforms, at first somewhat generic but later increasingly targeted ads, to the point where in the end we were only showing ads to people we thought would definitely be interested in the service. We also tried a company that specializes in online ads. Perhaps our experience was not representative, but I can tell you without a doubt that it was a complete waste of time and money, as the acquired customers were very few and very low quality. What really worked, by far, was simply stopping the ads and relying on word-of-mouth recommendations. That's how the business really got going. This is not a niche business, it is something that is occasionally needed by most people, either by going to the business physically or online. The competition was only small, mostly local businesses, there are exactly zero large national or multinational businesses in this market.

So I don't know, maybe the ad market here where I live is crap or maybe it's simply that it's completely dominated by all the giant companies, but all I can tell you is that I would praise the Gods if all ads magically disappeared tomorrow.