Even assuming you’re right in principle, there’s a basic problem here: ads have value (to the advertiser, to the network, to the site showing them, and potentially to the user). And ads have costs paid by the parties other than the user (lots of money changes hands and some compute may be incurred, too), and that’s fine, and the parties in control are strongly motivated to control those costs. But there are also costs that are effectively externalities as far as the companies involved are concerned, and those are bandwidth, battery usage, and degradation of the user experience.

So if anyone wants to seriously call the modern ad system a benefit to the user, then those externalities should be controlled. Either the actual bandwidth costs should be accounted as losses to the user, or the advertiser should be forced to pay those costs. And I bet that ads would start using far less bandwidth with no change in appearance if the advertisers started caring.