Come on. That's like still bringing up the Sony CD rootkit incident as a valid reason to boycott them so many years later. Ubuntu reversed course on ads pretty quickly, and if any of the past 4-6 years worth of LTS releases included ads, then they were so unobtrusive I literally didn't notice anything was there.
If you want to hurt Linux adoption by discouraging the most Just Works distribution for normal people, be my guest. But please at least figure out if it's still got any actual problems that are as bad as the ads in the past, like snap or systemd or something (which IMO aren't even such huge issues - most users won't care).
