No. We got content without this in the past, and we can do this in the future. And I will note THEY admit this is bad. Stop trying to defend the indefensible.
Who paid for the content I actually visit StackOverflow for? It surely wasn't SO; they provide a nice platform but they also get that content for free. This isn't a journalism site, the value in SO comes from freely provided user answers. Yes, SO provides some value vs. forums via their q/a platform, but it is a marginal amount of value.
Sure, SO is easier than parsing a forum thread, but the actual value that I care about is the answers provided for free by their users. I could easily return to 90's era usenet, it wasn't as convenient but it worked. What I couldn't deal with is a lack of a platform where people ask technical questions & get answers, I remember being on dial-up and reading paper manuals that were out-of-date/incomplete. But SO isn't irreplaceable, and I am oftentimes frustrated with finding questions closed for incorrect reasons, normally my answer is buried 2 links deep in SO because my DDG search (and Google too) takes me to an improperly closed question where the 'previously addressed' question is adjacent to my query.
StackOverflow does not provide an irreplaceable service; like github they do some nice things but there isn't any reason they must be the dominant platform. And the real value is in the answers, which SO gets for free.
"it wasn't as convenient but it worked" - this is the story of every single dead product. Zunes were less convenient than iPods and iPhones. Books are less convenient than Kindles. AltaVista and Yahoo Directories were less convenient than Google.
SO doesn't pay for the content, they pay for the space to host that content and community. Since users aren't paying, SO needs to monetize it somehow and that's what the ads are for.
I'm sure you could return to the old internet, but many billions of other internet users enjoy the content they consume for free. Use your adblocker and stick with paywall/subscription sites because we're unlikely to ever go back to a pre-commercial internet.
A tiny nitpick: nothing is free, the internet users just pay with a different currency: their data and attention. Both of these things are much more valuable than most internet users think.
As far as a non-commercial internet goes... well, we can always hope. We just have to wrangle the means of content production and control (heh, heh, see what I did there?). The resources are there to do that and have a free (both as in beer and in freedom) and high-quality internet, what we are missing is... attention of the masses, the most expensive thing.
The last remaining excuse of advertisers: you wouldn't want something to happen to your favorite content? That would be a shame.
Yes, most people would not be "fine" if they lost their googles and youtubes and stack overflows. But then in a few weeks or maaaybe months they'd get over it, because none of these "free" services are in any way essential. Paid alternatives will pop up where needed.
What excuse? Advertisers aren't concerned, there will always be advertising inventory available.
And paid alternatives have been tried for decades (ExpertsExchange if you want a specific example here). It's not a revolutionary idea, it just doesn't work for most content.
