Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.