I'm confused. It's too much work to upgrade dependencies, but not too much time to write from scratch and maintain, in perpetuity, original code?

Something like 60-70% of violent crime involves victims and offenders that know each other, and with murder and sexual assault it's 70-80%.

It's understandable, but it's a position that doesn't consider the large swathe of lower-income households that have access to goods and services subsidized through ads (much of my family). I know it's not a position most of HN seems to be sympathetic with, but for many ad-supported services, including Netflix and Spotify, would be inaccessible without ads. My family can't afford to go out to movies regularly, or spend money out at restaurants, or go on vacation (ever), but they still deserve some leisure time and entertainment and a non-trivial percentage of the market is funded through ads.

The idea that we should eliminate that because a higher-income bracket of consumers is inconvenienced by ads just comes across oddly haughty and privelaged to me.

Heck, I wouldn't have my successful career today if it wasn't for the ad-supported ISP NetZero CD I came stumbled upon in 1999.

That's a lovely fantasy, but there's a graveyard of failed businesses that didn't make it because customers couldn't find them.

Everything single one of those local businesses is also doing advertising, and is probably how you found them in the first place. They're buying local newspaper adverts, using flyers, or participating in valpaks/coupon mailers.