The 39.99MB of ads accompanying the 2KB of text you want to read possibly has less utility to you.
Also consider the utility of an ad blocker.
Maybe it's different if advertisers or publishers are paying viewer's data costs. But some amount of restraint might be nice. Personally, I don't use a lot on my phone when I'm out and about, other than chat apps, hn, text NPR and lite CNN, cause I used to be on a plan with a hard cutoff. But then, I have unmetered networking at home.
You might be paying for data, but you're not paying PC Gamer for reading them, so your opinion only starts to matter when you quit reading them over how much data they use.
The question I guess is really if PC Gamer earns more by sending 100 mb / minute and chasing some eyeballs away faster, than by using a reasonable amount of data and losing eyeballs at the normal rate of attrition for written word outlets.
1600x1200 is limited to 256 colors. However, you can still get up to 16-24bit at higher resolutions than many modern Win11 laptops support.
So by reading this article on PC gamer you've now downloaded the equivalent of a full-length movie worth of low quality code and ads.
A DVD (single layer) holds about 4.7GB of data.
Just for ads on a website.
700MB “rips” are heavily compressed with modern codecs.