I do personally wish the role of ad based monetization models were included in these conversations more often. With both traditional media and social media the conversation tends to blame ideology for their shortcomings but in reality it's just, as you noted, a bad incentive model. They aren't ideological, they're just maximizing the amount of your attention they can capture because that maximizes the amount of ad revenue they can bring in.
There are certain people in certain, specific, situations that have a strong enough ideological stance to make a decision based on that ideology, counter to the one they're incentivized to make. But the majority of the people in the majority of situations are going to make the incentivized choice. If you want to really change something, you have to change the incentives.