>It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part.
No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking.
E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock
Lots of ads-without-tracking still anger people. The commercials interrupting the tv and radio broadcasts, the ugly billboards around the city, etc. What gp is saying is that most of them would still listen to the radio "for free with the ads" rather pay extra for ad-free Sirius XM music or ad-free Spotify subscription. That majority preference is why ad-funded businesses dominate the paid-membership business models.
"People" vary widely in what irritates them, and the most vocal people are usually the outliers, not the average. Which creates the environment you describe: some outliers complain a lot about ads in all forms (myself included), while the majority of people continue to prefer free things with ads.
Note that this is not the same thing as the outliers who complain about ads also choosing free-with-ads products. I never choose ads given a choice, but my wallet-vote isn't strong enough to counteract the majority that do.
If only ads were expensive to display there’s be a lot less and probably people would be okay with them. The sheer amount make them unbearable to many. Remember magazines people were paying for had ads and people didn’t hate them?
Most of the people that object to ads that interrupt content are objecting because of the interruption and not because of a fundamental stance against ads.
Someone else mentioned magazines. I would say that ads in magazines do not interrupt, and you'll also see that very few people fuss about them. Your average banner or search ad doesn't do much interrupting as long as it's not filling half the screen; not harmless but it's on the less bad end. Ads on radio and video interrupt quite a lot, and the really massive interruptions happen when video ads take over the screen during live streams and you miss whatever happened while they ran.
No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking.
E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock
Lots of ads-without-tracking still anger people. The commercials interrupting the tv and radio broadcasts, the ugly billboards around the city, etc. What gp is saying is that most of them would still listen to the radio "for free with the ads" rather pay extra for ad-free Sirius XM music or ad-free Spotify subscription. That majority preference is why ad-funded businesses dominate the paid-membership business models.