There is no reason properly engineered forum software should require advertising code to run.
If Discourse decides to bake in anti-features, the only thing it’s going to force people to do is either fork Discourse or migrate to something else. Those of us that do not like big tech / ad stuff feel very strongly about this. Discourse will NOT force it on us, no matter how hard it is pushed. (Ubuntu tried this on us and now my highest starred repo is something that removes the ads ;))