I'd imagine at some point depriving sites of revenue will lead to adversarial outcomes where many if not all will simply refuse to load. So if ad blockers become mainstream it will be interesting change to the web.
I was quite shocked when I discovered that some people with deep pockets think of ads as product information. Their behavior is entirely the opposite of ours. They click on all of them and buy stuff just to be sure they are not missing out. I on the other hand click 1 banner per year and I click search ads if I'm searching for that specific product. If I block ads on all pages except search (where I use them) google would benefit greatly. My clicks per impression would go up. Bids would follow.
At least some ad views have to convert to sales or companies would have long ago given up on the advertising medium.
It is hard to imagine someone who went through the age of Flash-based ads not looking at all injected advertisements with a sense of utter scorn, though. The split between content provider and advertising marketplace otherwise seems to mean that both consider the end user to only be valued in terms of their eyeballs.
I suspect it is because for some people, the advertisements actually are on-point and represent things they might be interested in.
I still find direct advertisement arrangements - such as temporarily co-branding a gaming site with a launching game, having a podcast talk about sponsors' products - to be much more on point.
I'm not sure I believe that. People with deep pockets (unless they got that way via inheritance, winning the lottery, etc) typically got that way by being smart about money, not FOMO.
Apple did implement content blockers to block ads. I do not see ads when I use Safari in iOS or macOS.