Not only is ad-blocking not illegal and not immoral, but US the federal government's cyber crime division actively recommends it as a good security practice to avoid being defrauded:
For anyone that considers ads to be a legitimate form of "payment", consider whether you feel the same about a site running a background crypto miner without your explicit consent. If you find the crypto miner worse for some reason (my sense is most people seem to think that'd be wrong), note that the crypto miner is a much more direct form of payment that doesn't also spy on you and does not seek to manipulate you.
Also note that the same company that's running that expensive infrastructure pretty much completely controls the direction of the web, and could overnight make it so that almost everyone's browser has built-in torrent support and allows magnet links as a src for video tags. Or they can choose to have that not be true so that you must distribute media through expensive centralized platforms that only a multi-trillion dollar corporation like them could afford.
https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221
For anyone that considers ads to be a legitimate form of "payment", consider whether you feel the same about a site running a background crypto miner without your explicit consent. If you find the crypto miner worse for some reason (my sense is most people seem to think that'd be wrong), note that the crypto miner is a much more direct form of payment that doesn't also spy on you and does not seek to manipulate you.
Also note that the same company that's running that expensive infrastructure pretty much completely controls the direction of the web, and could overnight make it so that almost everyone's browser has built-in torrent support and allows magnet links as a src for video tags. Or they can choose to have that not be true so that you must distribute media through expensive centralized platforms that only a multi-trillion dollar corporation like them could afford.