An advertising-funded product will always prioritize engagement - they want you to "engage" with the product even if it means degrading the experience intentionally such as making a process manual or take more steps than necessary (so that you are exposed to more ads). The "destroy civil society" problem you mention is a direct consequence of the pursuit of engagement.

In contrast, with a paid product, the company's interests are directly aligned with yours and they have no incentive to intentionally degrade the experience or get in your way any more than necessary. They don't care about how much you "engage" with the product as long as the bill gets paid (if anything, the less you engage the better as it uses less server resources).