The solution is not one many people want to hear: reduce production costs.

Content is expensive to make mostly because the people making it keep demanding more pay for less work. While it is understandable that people want this, this is not sustainable for an economy. When the economy fails, prices go up. Demanding employers pay more will immediately raise prices the same amount the wages increase, effectively leaving employees who got a raise in the same place they were before but eith bigger numbers, and severely damaging the economy at the same time.

A show can be produced on a shoestring budget. Yes, the quality is lower than a million dollar movie. However, that doesn't make the show bad. The X-Files was a great show produced on a tiny budget in its first season with phenomenal writing. Yet in the final season, it had a bigger budget but the writing was awful. In fact, most shows these days have awful writing. And the writers of these shows with bad writing are demanding more pay, yet their writing quality does not indicate they deserve increased pay. Certainly if a writer is outputting great work that should be rewarded, but increasing the pay of writers outputting garbage writing can only lead to more expensive garbage.

Then you get to costume, props, and visual effects. First, the damaged economy from before appears in costumes and props material cost. This is unavoidable. In many cases, I would say that good practical effects are cheaper and more convincing than cheap CG. My solution is simply go back to the way films were made in the 70s and 80s. Ditch the bad CG and go for more practical effects.

Last we have actors. Actors do not need more than 100k per film, and thats for the huge actors. Simple to understand, really. So many actors live opulent, overpaid lives, when they could live more simply, more normally, off of much less.

The above aalso applies to directors, producers, streaming company executives and CEOs.

Fix all these and your show production costs plummet. Now you can offer your streaming service at the same cost or cheaper than before while having a larger profit margin.

no one will ever get me to pay for ads

I don't know where this comes from. Ads are a currency. You choose to allow ads to replace or supplement your payment, or you can choose to pay to forego them, on most all of these services. That's not an option we ever had with cable (or any type of social media, for that matter).

Running these services costs money and you pay money to fund them. These industries have operating at a loss for many years and they are just getting around to being profitable, and they do that by increasing costs.

If you don't want to pay for the service, just be upfront and say so.