The best one I know is web.archive.org/

Unfortunately, no archive site manages to archive every article before a paywall goes up. I've had the best luck on archive.org by selecting the earliest snapshot they have.

Speaking of cooking and not wanting to see 20 videos playing over the recipe:

based.cooking/

No ad blockers needed

Not even a linux guy, but I had a Pi from a decade ago that I never opened, decided to set it up and use it for something useful, friends suggested Pihole. pained myself for 2 days getting everything working (most of my trouble had to do with peripherals and IP addresses not the device itself) but after the grief, got it working and it was well worth it.

I even printed a sticker for it that said "where ads go to die"

sorry doubleclick, but you're toast

Before I used Firefox on Android, any search about a game I'm playing would result in a half page video ad in the top half of the screen, accompanied by the bottom half being a request to share your data with 1496 trusted data partners.

Now I use Firefox with add ons, and I get the results I requested. The modern web is basically unusable in it's raw form.

There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.

And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you "don't even mind" it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people's brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.

There is nothing like a free lunch.

You either have to directly pay for something or indirectly pay for it by selling your time or data.

Companies need to get their name out there and in the past you did that with a banner on your building, a space in the phone book and maybe your name on the side of the vans. Now we live in the digital world and we use digital advertisement. Heck a lot of companies sponsor certain event including charity events.

If we would totally remove advertisement, your local mom-and-pop shops will get more traffic, but in a lot of countries they would have basically a monopoly unless another competitor exists in the same region.

I don't really mind watching a bit of advertisement on something like a YouTube video or a banner ad on a site. Heck, buildings or vans with logos etc are fine as well in my opinion. My issue is more with the tracking and some forced advertisement (putting your logo on my clothing, vehicle etc).

Ok, it's obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don't get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn't serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can't have democracy without free press, and currently we don't have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.

Independent reviews are a good thing yes and they shouldn't be sponsored by a related company to keep their integrity, that doesn't mean they can't get paid from a different form of advertising.
Heck you can even check on the integrity of professionals differently. In the accountancy, we are paid by the clients who we need to audit or need to advice etc. Using things like third party audits and a high accountability for professionals.

Ratings aren't that great especially on platforms like Amazon/AliExpress and other crap offering dropshipping platforms from corrupt countries.

Corporations generally don't do anything for free, but a lot of companies do, but that is generally to get their name out there or because the owner wants to decuct his private life from his company profit ...
Even governments can't spend money or personal all they want, in the end it is money from the people. People here in NL are pissed that the government spend money on things like getting the NATO here for the last meeting or for the royal family.
The public broadcasting is also something that is under heat and not just here.

In most countries you have some kind of government funded press heck I think most press aren't even corporations, but more companies except some of the larger once maybe.

Almost nobody is going to work for free for the majority of their life. It would be better if all of us did more work for society, but most people aren't in the position I am in that they just can take an extra week off to do that.

I agree consumerism is killing our planet, but there is a huge difference between the crap a companies like Google are doing and your local plummer who has advertisement on the local radio on their van and make a slightly SEO optimised website. Advertising is often the only way to get your company visable if you are competing with a well established company.
Same reason as that there is nuance between companies and corporations.

Yes we need to promote repairing, reusing, recycling and the circular economy I agree, but somebody like iFixit wouldn't really thrive without their advertisement. We also need more financial transparency by the company we buy from and just skip on companies from China, the US and other obvious corrupt countries.