The other problem is that more and more content now is designed for (or only tolerable on) larger phone screens. Go to any website these days on a smaller phone like an iPhone mini and more than 50% (being charitable here) of the screen will be taken up by garbage like ads, cookie banners, popups, etc.
It's a vicious cycle. Phone manufactures make the screen bigger, app and website developers realize they can cram more junk on the page, consumers demand larger screens as a result, return to step 1.
This is HN. OP is 100% right to be flabbergasted that people on this site are not using the best and brightest of the ad blockers available. I know I am.
Ironically, I have the opposite problem with website design. So many sites are clearly designed for mobile screen sizes, with a teensy-tiny strip of text on my large monitor. It's very unpleasant to read lines of text that short, so on a lot of sites I have to go into dev tools and set the text width to 1200px to make it an actual comfortable reading experience. I should not have to mess with CSS to make websites readable, but here we are.
It's a vicious cycle. Phone manufactures make the screen bigger, app and website developers realize they can cram more junk on the page, consumers demand larger screens as a result, return to step 1.