This is a cat mouse fight, and Facebook already does some ultra-shady stuff like rendering a word as a list of randomly ordered divs for each character, and only using CSS to display in a readable way.

But it can't be made impossible, at the worst case we can always just capture the screen and use an AI to recognize ads, wasting a lot of energy. The same is true for cheating in video games and many forms of online integrity problems - I can just hire a good player who would play in my place, and no technology could recognize that.

I wonder how much the developers writing that are being paid to be complete assholes.

I've personally resigned from positions for less and it hasn't cost me much comfort in life (maybe some career progression perhaps but, meh).

I'm not making a legal argument.

Why would someone else make a legal argument for you? You're the one saying it should be illegal.

Can you genuinely not see the disconnect here?

Perhaps require monitoring of the arm muscle electrical signals, build a profile, match the readings to the game actions and check that the profile matches the advertised player

(To make scraping and automation harder, perhaps?)

However ads still need to be delivered over the net so there is still some way to block them (without resorting to router/firewall level blocking).

Not gonna happen.

I see it as an opportunity to do better.

lol, you can scrape anything visible on your screen.