It is at the very least extremely nontrivial and not at all straightforward, even if everyone agrees it's not ideal. I'm not asking you to "cry about the deals of immoral industries" - rather as a pragmatist, I'm asking you to consider that unless we have a concrete way forward, suggesting to kill the industry is not productive.
Categorically speaking, advertising as a problem has several notable properties:
1. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is harmful (contrast with e.g. murder),
2. Reasonable people can disagree about how harmful it is (contrast with e.g. financial fraud),
3. It enables a significant portion (perhaps the majority?) of growth in the tech sector, which itself has empowered the lion's share of economic growth in the past decade,
4. There are few opportunities even within tech which will both pay comparably and which are not either directly or indirectly funded by advertising profits. Of those opportunities, some (such as fintech) are similarly disagreeable to another subset of the population.
The state of the world we live in is such that problems with these characteristics cannot be realistically solved by reducing or taking away the livelihoods of people who enable the problems to exist. I'm not telling you to not care about the problem. I'm also not telling you it can't be fixed. But I am telling you that you can't be so cavalier about what solving the problem entails if you actually want it to change.
If you think reasonable people can't disagree with you about this topic, then fine. Forget that! Instead replace that thought with the idea that a nontrivial number of software engineers - likely the supermajority - will be materially impacted by significantly changing the amount of tracking enabled by advertising. You cannot tell them to just take up knitting anymore than you can tell people who disagree with you to just stop disagreeing with you. If only it were that easy.
