I'm okay with that. I can't help but think the internet was better when it was mostly unpaid hobbyists and personal blogs without commercial interests.

The problem is that people are using their ad budget to compete with free content, but the free content is still going to be there it will just appear higher up in the search results if various bad actors aren't paying for a bunch of SEO.

That's false. Perhaps the author would not have bothered to write the article without securing economic compensation of some form, but advertisement is not the only possibility.

I guarantee you no important information is going to go totally unreported anywhere, even if ads ceased to exist globally tomorrow.

On the other hand, a whole lot of recycled content mills where all the $0.05/paragraph contract writers are about to be replaced by GPT-4 probably would.