There is nothing special about the Troubled Engineer's setup. It's mostly a matter of using open platforms. With Firefox on the desktop and Fennec on Android (Graphene), you get full uBlock Origin support and therefore never see any ads anywhere, even on Youtube. On Android, there is also NewPipe that offers "free Youtube Premium" (play in the background and download).
I also use DNS based filtering since I run my own Unbound instance, but it isn't really necessary with the above setup. It may be useful if you must absolutely have a smart TV or other such appliances, but considering that they have cameras and microphones, I will never connect such a device to the Internet anyway.
It would be so easy to place ads based on page contents and not based on retargeting. It would be such a breath of fresh air. You wouldn't need to know anything about the person visiting the page. You can still do programmatic ads with competitive bidding. And even according to Double click study, you would make about fifty five percent (iirc) of what you would make with all this invasive tracking.
In an alternate reality where tracking was 100% illegal all the time, would the ad revenue come closer to say 90%, with perhaps 10% choosing another medium altogether? These studies by ad companies seem to always presume their own perfect world where everything else remains just as it is.
Mostly, although some text analysis would need to be done to prevent this:
(people commenting about how a bad design choice in ACorp's flagship product AProduct led to the tragic death of ten labradoodle puppies.)
AD: Buy two AProduct, get one free — limited time offer! Woof! ACorp — your pup will love it!
There is an extension you can download which can enable background play without dekstop mode too. I forgot its name but I thought it was relevant to the discussion and maybe someone can help find it.
How about ads inside apps on android? I used to have AdGuard dns configured but somehow was still seeing ads in some games. I guess they were self hosting ads or had the DNS server hard coded in the app…
I also use DNS based filtering since I run my own Unbound instance, but it isn't really necessary with the above setup. It may be useful if you must absolutely have a smart TV or other such appliances, but considering that they have cameras and microphones, I will never connect such a device to the Internet anyway.