It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.
The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those
Regarding the second link, I’ve personally git pulled Ryujinx about once a week (except this week lol) ever since Yuzu was taken down. I don’t know enough about git to know if commits earlier in the history can be manipulated whilst keeping later commit hashes identical, but I can confirm that the commits from last Tuesday match up with my local copy in terms of hash, author and message