The Internet was free (and much less corporate) before ads.

Yeah, and only a few million people had acess to slow ass speeds that took you days to download a small video.

Google and Facebook brought billions of people to the internet and gave them access to information they would otherwise have no access too. Thanks to them selling ads.

How would YouTube which give everyone free access to billions and billions of hours of content for free be possible without ads?

The web was orders of magnitudes smaller before ads. I don't think we can draw conclusions from that comparison one way or the other.

internet was free even before ads.