Question is, what business model would you support?

Ads are the thing that pay for a lot of services most people use in daily lives. Imagine you needed a paid subscription for your email, your search engine, browser, social media account(s)...

Lemmy is fun and all, but eventually it will need to expand and pay for server costs and so on. Yes, perhaps it will be carried by enthusiastic community members, but that's just a higher paid subscription for a few rather than many.

I agree fully with you that the level of commercialisation is beyond crazy by now, and many developments do not have the user in mind. But that's not on the business model itself, but the companies' decisions.