Were there entirely ad-powered business models with customer facing support before the Internet?
I can think of magazines and radio, but by definition they had localised reach, and there was no actual "users" that might need support, unlike many Internet ad-funded freeware.
> You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed.
Because much of the Internet has scaled up drastically?
To your example of AliExpress, how many more users do you think they have now compared to a decade ago? How much do you think their support volume has increased? Therefore it's entirely natural that they've looked at avenues of cutting costs.