I honestly think I'd prefer that they just let me pay them outright rather than trying to use me as bait for advertisers. The expectation that everything should be free leads to what we see today

You ever though about where the money from advertisers comes from? I would pay for Google if I would then pay less for products that waste money on "marketing" by paying millions to Google.

The thing is that there aren't significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that's working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.