Come on man, putting ads is not enshittification. Haven't you used the Internets 20 years ago? It was a decent way to live for the webmaster in those good old times when most of the traffic was from humans.
My dude adding ads to a free product after locking people into using it for free is LITERALLY the example used by Doctorow in his original article[1] that COINED the term “enshittification”. It couldn’t be more accurate if you tried.
There are a lot of examples of enshittification. Putting advare was never enshittification, no matter how intrusive they are. They are never unbearable. There are a lot of thing tangential to ads which is enshittification, for example dark patterns.
But if the alternative of ads is communism it is not enshittification.