The issue is, that people always say this but then people don’t donate.
People have server costs and living costs and ads are realistically the only way to contribute to those. I always swing €5 here and there to developers whos apps I use often but most people don’t: look at the Ko-fi page of small devs and they probably have less than €50 total, That’s a couple months of server costs probably.
Indeed, I only use Mail and VPN but still have to pay for all of them. I did consider just paying for Mail and getting VPN from Mullvad but then I only get 10 SimpleLogin emails which is nowhere near enough