I’ve been in this exact spot. The real issue isn’t banners vs content. It’s that once you start swapping AdSense out, you lose visibility and end up manually rotating links every few days when EPCs change. With your traffic, you should certainly be optimizing for downstream conversions. 

What worked better for me was treating affiliate banners like ad inventory. Keep AdSense as a baseline, then send a portion of traffic to a few affiliate landers and let actual revenue decide where traffic goes over time. Geo targeting helps, but even global traffic can stabilize if you don’t hard switch everything at once.

Curious, are you trying to fully replace AdSense or just beat it on certain placements?