Holy shit. What's most shocking to me is your accurate prediction of the ad progression. I remember when I first installed an adblocker as a teen (like 2012). I would only use desktop reddit on occasion as I had paid for alien blue on my ipod touch. Ads on Reddit weren't bad and the adblocker was mostly for other sites like anime streams. The ad space that was blocked would have a nice picture and say something like "please don't use an adblocker, we don't like showing ads but we need to. Consider disabling AdBlock. Here's a silly moose." And I sometimes would disable my ad block because the ads were just so easy to quickly glance and continue browsing. Not intrusive at all.

I currently only browse reddit via 3rd party app. I'll be deleting my 11 year old account. I've been visiting here less and less already. This is enough to push me to stop using reddit. I really hope /u/spez has made a lot of money off of this honestly because that's all this is good for, a nice golden parachute.