They and possibly op (with their argument that 99.9% ad free) is referring to modern day advertisements that mass manipulates people. A person in 2000 BC telling their spice is better doesn’t compare to our modern advertisement system which targets suggestible people with well placed targeted ads. They also are probably referring to those ads which you constantly see barging into your every day life in the form of billboards, banners etc. If you were to search for a something in Google, most often the front result would be non relevant SEO garbage or AI gibberish promoting something which is not relevant to something you searched. Oh you want to know why you have this BSOD screen and warning, check out this antivirus software sort of bullshit results.

Even though what you said is right, that advertisement has fundamentally existed ever since human moved out of tribal society, the form of advertisement we see now is never before seen and in my opinion which I agree with OP is than we can indeed abolish current form of advertisement and move on without significant impact on normal people. Ofcourse we would still be documenting products and people who want that could still seek out what they want based on their requirement (this might qualify as advertisement since the product won’t be seen without information regarding it, but it’s no way comparable to the form of advertisement you and I mentioned above).

Who’s a good kitty?

Ahh good old times, jumping from building to building like hulk. It had good story too which I didn’t appreciate the first time I played cause I was young and couldn’t understand it fully.