I disagree. I don't see how it can be unwinnable.

Even if it were an endless game of whack-a-mole, free adblock plugins don't have a fraction of the resources of Facebook.

Publishers became greedy, ads became intrusive, and users reacted by flocking to adblockers.

Now the users have taken it too far and publishers are forced to respond.

No one is owed an ad-free experience.

The cost to deliver 'unblocked' ads is exponentially more expensive than the cost to block ads. Ads also have to be properly identified to avoid CAN-SPAM issues, so unless they ignore those laws, it will always be relatively 'easy' to programmatically identify ads.

What if it was a set of pixels instead?

even better, the entire page is rendered using the canvas api, using obfuscated javascript