[mrob]

If advertising were genuinely about informing potential customers then it would be nothing but specs, prices and independent third party benchmarks. The old Computer Shopper magazine used to be similar to this. People would buy it just for the ads because they provided real value. Modern advertising has much stronger focus on psychological trickery, to the point that advertisers actually use fMRI brain scanning to optimize their ads to be as manipulative as possible. And because manipulative ads are more effective, there's a race to the bottom and minimal chance that less harmful advertising will become the norm again. The only safe option is to block all ads, or to get laws passed restricting what advertisers can do. The latter seems unlikely, so declining to request adverts (the web is a pull medium, nobody "blocks" ads) is the only way to protect yourself.