Specifically, ublock origin. The "origin" part is important.
If being shown none isnt an option
Not being shown ads is always an option.
Get an adblocker. ublock origin for PC and android firefox is great. Adaway on android blocks most ads from other apps. And I don't use apple products, but I've heard Adguard works there.
Overall users? Probably not. The casual lurker does not know or care what an API is.
But the vast majority of content is made by a tiny fraction of the user base, and that fraction are the ones they pissed off. The quality of posts on large subs very much went down, with repost bots becoming even more prominent than before.
According to the /r/ModCoord thread, those are humans, kind of - the first one was a friend of the only active former mod that had an AI write that text for the lulz and posted it. The second was someone that copied it, hoping for exactly this result. And then, with two identical posts, the memelords took over.
They openly post their finances, you can take a look: https://blog.mastodon.world/
The $1200 is for both mastodon.world and lemmy.world combined, but yeah. Most of it (80%) is going towards Hetzner, which is their cloud storage/hosting provider.