In late 90s the web was better, people tried to keep good content. Web pages were edited manually. Care web into pages. Yes we had young and noons with overused animated gifs and horrible free sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod.
But the web exited just fine before ads. I had my own domain name back in late 90s when it was $70 a year.
It wasn't a RSS feed AdSense scam site that imported headlines and click bait titles from random RSS feeds.
Folks cared about their web page and took care of it, learning HTML, making awesome designs, the good sites stood out.
Now every damn site is WordPress, Drupal, Loomla, Tumble, Squarespace themed site with RSS feeds to simulate updated content, and AdSense, amazon ads, and more all over it.
Ads killed the web, no more creativity, no more enjoyment of caring for your site, no more original content.
For that my router has adblock add-on. It auto downloads block list every 24 hours. Blocks all ads at the router, no ads on desktop, mobiles, etc.