Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can't make a functional video player or a mobile app

It honestly wouldn't be that hard at all. You deliver ads via the API alongside actual posts, as if they are an actual post, and forbid altering them in the developer ToS. If you want to be anal about enforcement, run popular 3rd-party apps in an emulator to verify that the JSON returned by the site is unaltered when it's rendered in the app. You could put this together in a weekend.

Which really just speaks to quality of talent at reddit, or the management at reddit suppressing that talent. Or both.

a mobile app that doesn't annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests

Speaking of which, how on Earth it's such a slug these days? I pretty much quit Reddit when the protest started and moved to Lemmy. I never used any other Android app since I was reasonably happy with the official app. However, when I launched it to check how my old subs fared, I was quite surprised at how slow, laggy and bloated POS it had come.

I honestly don't remember it being this crappy just a few weeks ago.