You say "I think ads should [be] embedded directly in the content .... That's all they ever should have been allowed to do" you seem to be saying "only first party [direct sold, advertisiing brand buys space from publisher and gives publisher an image or video to embed] ads, and no third party tracking or ads". Do I understand you correctly?

The problem is most publishers do not have scale, and (flip side of same coin), together they are too numerous, for publishers to do direct sales to brands of all or even their best ad space (inventory). They must use third parties.

Advertisers, too, want to "buy audience" across many sites, which means tracking in the current ecosystem.

Thus, today, in any of the top browsers that lack ad and tracker blocking, your machine is already deeply involved in "the logistics of getting ads". Almost all ads, even direct sold ones, place via script on page interacting with the main ad server scripts (Google Doubleclick For Publishers [DFP]).

You can't have it both ways: either you need an active user agent that blocks third party cookies and scripts, as Brave and a few others do; or you will have ad logistics running amok on your device, in your browser or webview (which is why we get a 3-7x speed win on Android vs. Chrome). The only path forward is to break the web by blocking third party scripts and trackers. Wishing for publishers to do direct ads as if pasting up ad art on paper won't work.