As another data point, I’m writing this from my fold 6 which is about one year old, with no scratches nor marks of any kind.

I’m not sure reality is like you imagine… Blogs were full of ads back in the day. Templates for blogs even had huge areas for ads.

If you want a good search engine try Kagi. I’ve been using it for a long time and cannot go back to anything else, since the results are so good.

And if you want something more curated (old school sites where content is the primary focus) Kagi has Small Web (kagi.com/smallweb). It’s like good old days StumbleUpon.