I'm guessing you missed the time period where opening the wrong page would give you an infinite loop of un-closeable pop-up windows with background music.

Ads were never really non-obtrusive. If advertisers could force you to listen to their slogan at max volume every time you opened your browser, they would do so without hesitation. If you ever saw an easily avoidable ad in the late 90s-early 00s, it wasn't for lack of trying. They simply hadn't personally figured out more annoying methods yet.

What magical era is this? Because the before-adblocker time I remember was a hellscape of pop-over popups, sometimes many of them from opening a single web page.

.... ah, those were the days, of flash player ads that would grind your system to a halt with anti-aliased particle spam, minigames, and perhaps a virus too.

Or the sneaky, stealthy, cpu grinding carpet bomb of the pop-under ads, only visible after you close the browsing window.

It's become even worse since mobile became dominant.

Now the ads are no longer a bit of text or a gif, but full page shit covering the top half of what you want to see and stubbornly staying in place even as you scroll. The bottom half of the screen is a sea of cookie and data consent forms who's only interest is in making you agree out of sheer frustration.

And this is fuelled by bullshit, clickbait driven sites that use 10 paragraphs of useless AI generated padding with ads in between, to resist telling you what you went there to find out.

Google has destroyed the usability of the internet, and if it wasn't them it would have been some other greedy fuckers.

Some of the first ads on the Internet were pop-ups. Ads always sucked.

The worst part is, I still want those crazy cursors

No, I remember hating those banner ads.

Carbon Ads does non-intrusive ads very well