Its always amazing to me how, even on a site inhabited almost exclusively by people that make a living writing software, people get so offended by the idea of paying for software. As long as software does not have lock-in and is offered for a reasonable price, I'm very happy to pay someone for their time and ingenuity.
Others will prefer to go the subscription fee route to get rid of them.
Some others will look at the ads and just decide to use software without anything like that in the first place, something truly free.
I think it's nice that we get the choice and that there's enough software out there for that to be the case. At the same time, if developers are successfully monetizing web based software, I wonder why that's not the case for desktop software.
I remember using a program called RaiDrive (https://www.raidrive.com/) to mount ext4 volumes through SFTP on a Windows machine and it worked pretty well, however they had an ad banner at the top of the window which seemed oddly fitting for a free version of software with lots of functionality, but maybe that's just due to me being used to ads everywhere nowadays (albeit uBlock Origin and Pi-hole exist).